Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

Tippis

Tippis
Viajero said:
Re that meme, wasnt Strike Commander actually released and reasonably succesful?
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Released yes.
Successful… meh. It was a standard Chris product: far too demanding on hardware to allow for a wide audience, and too derivative to make it really appealing even within the niche.

But above all, it failed to deliver on any of its lofty promises and supposed bragging points, if nothing else than by being almost three years late to the game.
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
LittleAnt said:
For real, where did you saw the project is dead ? Have you some secret infos to give us ?
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As AgonyAunt says, I think the project they're describing as dead is the dream-scoped project of the stretch goal days. With its ever expanding 100+ systems, down to bullet-in-the-chamber scale, with 10x the polygons of other competitors, and 100k players in a shared shard, flying Javelins filled with 80 characters, while a convincing 9:1 NPC ratio connects up the skies...

LittleAnt said:
It progress slowly, but it gets more and more alive patch after patch. Player base growing, funding growing, gameplay growing, techs growing... like it or not, it's the opposite of death.
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The upward slope you describe is an interesting one. It's not uncommon amongst optimistic followers of the game. The small increments that are often seen as a steady build towards a larger positive end which resembles the big pitch. (I don't know if indeed that's how you see it, but it's a bit of a trend amongst some backers to read the latter from the former.)

It's fun to take a look at those indicators of growth though:

Those persistent baby steps:

  • Player base growing: This one's a bit too much of a guesstimate for me.
    • We know the account figures include free fliers etc, not just active, paid-up backers. (As of 2016 Turbulent reckoned only half of all accounts had bought in). Not to mention all the multiple accounts that whales tend to open up. So growth there isn't always representative of unique new purchasers etc.
    • Apparent numbers in the 'verse don't seem that high. Mining seems to attract ~32 players per hour. CIG reckons the average number of unique users completing missions per day between Dec 2019 - Feb 2020 was: 9,924. These are not big numbers.
    • Add in that funding vs account comparisons suggest that the majority of the cash is still coming from whales, rather than noob accounts, and I think the picture doesn't exactly scream player growth.
    • Anecdotally I'd say there are definitely plenty of new sign ups. But without a more reliable metric for general uniques over time, numbers could just as easily be dropping in player terms. (Or indeed in terms of refunds / greymarket bails etc ;)). We just don't know.

  • Funding growing: The tracker is mightily robust. (I think that in itself is somewhat odd, given just how sour sentiment is on Reddit / Spectrum at the moment etc, and how tied to whales the funding seems to be, but let's go with it ;)). Provisional tick there ;)

  • Tech growing: I'm going to tackle this before gameplay additions, because it impacts on them.
    • Lets take a core tech aspect like networking. Lots of seeming small steps forwards (Serialised Variable Culling, Bind Culling, Object Container Streaming, Server-Side Object Container Streaming, all in. Next stepping stone on the cards is iCache...). But the networking is still currently pretty woeful, and a fair way short of the vanilla instanced server stage which they're aiming for, let alone the envisioned promised land of 'Server Meshing'.
    • There comes a point where, as a layman, I start to wonder whether they should really have this fundamental underpinning tech in a better place to build out the game. And whether they can do it at all. It starts looking more like a very enthusiastic form of treading water, rather than something that's going to propel them into a rarified airspace ;).
    • And it's not like networking is alone in this. The physics grids get refactored, but don't actually improve (3.9's update introduced new EVA-to-ship issues, but brought none of the proposed benefits). The flight model is on its, what, 3rd major rework at least? And doesn't draw a huge amount of love. The treading water list is kinda long when it comes to big underpinning tech. (Only the assets of the planetary surfaces really stand out as robust).

  • Gameplay growing: This slides into the most subjective territory perhaps.
    • They're definitely adding stuff. But is it growing in terms of the big Stretch Goals pitch? Nah, not really. They've clearly struggled to add lynchpin gameplay additions from that dream list. Even more prosaic stuff like salvaging and refueling seem to be beyond them currently (they been on and off the roadmap for so many years now it's comical). Animals were supposed to make their first appearance with Hurston in Nov 2018. Tractor beams are supposed to be fizzing away on various half-finished ships. Detachable Caterpillar heads are supposed to be a thing, alongside other physics grid trickery like expandable Hull class ships. Etc etc etc. Fundamental, frequently ship-bought, big scale pitches. They're always one refactor away. Until the next one...
    • What they have added smacks mightily of 'the stuff we could do', in comparison. Prisons, recycling existing hand mining and mantling. Another tier of heads modulating the ship mining they've got into the game. Food, drink, & survival bars. Much more prosaic stuff.
    • Is a game made from 'the stuff we could manage' a super exciting end goal that's being built towards? I'm not so sure.

The funding chart is growing (if somewhat improbably ;)). But is the other stuff building towards a big lump of game to parallel it? I'm still set to sceptic personally ;)
 
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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Skizomeuh said:
The funding is growing, sure, but let's not forget expenses continue too.
Im amazed at how the funding counter is presented as a tangible thing, as if it stays untouched. They DON'T have this number in bank.
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Hey, it doesn't matter that they nearly burned through all their revenue, a benevolent producer has stepped in!

All growth is good alright ;)
 
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Thargon

Thargon
Asp Explorer said:
I enjoy SC. Very few IT projects have filled me with so much mirth. A decade in, a third of a billion dollars in funding, and it's not even been released yet because absolutely everything needs constant rework before it is fit for release, yet all their development time is spent of making jpegs and shiny videos of already outdated concepts :D
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But but... you don't understand Game development!

Chris: Let's start this super game development! It's a brilliant idea!!
Let's create the most ambitious game ever, it's a wonderful scam, noone will notice!!
Let's start with the graphics, it's gotta have great graphics right? Everyone loves brilliant graphics! It's an instant hook line and sinker! The fan's will never notice our devious scam!

10 years later...

It's too big to fail! Let's keep on trucking! Noone will notice!
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Skizomeuh said:
The funding is growing, sure, but let's not forget expenses continue too.
Im amazed at how the funding counter is presented as a tangible thing, as if it stays untouched. They DON'T have this number in bank.
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Oh wow, imagine if they actually kept a tracker of how much money they have. Pretty sure if they did that they would have crashed and burned in 2018 at the latest as the Calder thing wouldn't have been a 6 month late announcement for the forums would have already been asking 6 months earlier, where has all the cash gone!?
 

PiLhEaD

PiLhEaD
Number2 said:
....The increased funding can be used to put the project back on track without the his input. Looks like a win win scenario for some folk.
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I don't see that lack of funding has been an issue so far, so I'm not sure how at this stage any increased funding is going help.

Whatever the whereabouts of Genuine Cobblers, a worry is that too much work has already been completed to make fixing/finishing the game easy, and from the amount of rework already done it seems that to date the basics have been proving difficult to get working.

Whilst I'd be happy for SC to become a decent game I am struggling to feel any optimism based on the progress to date, with not a single star system complete and ships that get blown over in a wind. It seems to me that from the outset the game has painted itself into a corner with an apparent obsession with hand crafted perfection.
 

CMDR Dizzy

C
Surefoot said:
For EvE, which was designed before 2003 (IIRC, that's the release date, design is probably pre-2000) it's the main performance bottleneck. They are not using cloud but just a huge cluster, which is a product of the technology level from 20 years ago. Their RDBMS used to be SQL Server, which is the slowest offering, doubt they changed it in the mean time. As a result, the game pace is very slow, actions take seconds, and massive instances require preparation from CCP so they can allocate stronger cluster nodes to it, and even so massive instances are a slowwww crawl and even counting the time warp trick they use to try and preserver their database from melting.
You cannot afford that in a real time MMO, and technology moved quite a lot during 20 years. That's why CiG are using fancy names for in-memory caches and object persistence. The cloud allow to use distributed in-memory caches that deliver sub-millisecond response times (plus the network lag to the client of course) with O(log(n)) scaling, using binary tree indexing. You can have excellent performance for writes too if needed, and the eventual consistency is golden for that use case (only resolves when players actually interact, which is comparatively infrequent).
Are CiG using all of that ? Currently it's obviously a big no. From what i can see they use an SQL storage for the backend, as 30+ seconds response times (just to get a single player inventory !) were observed during fleet week. Again, transactions and rollbacks are a no-no in this environment, the game engine has to do without - there are proper ways to do it, but CiG are not known for "proper"...
I'll also point out that performance is a complete chain, and their network code is terribly inadequate, and is the first bottleneck we encounter. I highly suspect that their servers have a single thread dedicated to sorting client networking (then connected to the main game loop server-side), which doesnt matter in a low-player-count FPS, but definitely cannot do more than 50 players at once.
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Forum needs an insightful button instead of just like. We used to use in memory databases in the late 80;s/ early 90's but they went out of fashion for some reason. Catching up with an old colleague to day and his site did use one at one stage so must ask why they stopped. Probably peaking memory prices as it was like gold in cost at one stage.

Star Wars Galaxies used Oracle for their DBMS and after a restart or outage the players asset database took 15 minutes to load :(. So if you opened your in game inventory, you had to come back in 15 minutes before your got any response or could do anything more :). Again a miss understanding or miss sizing by the developers of the potential unique items a player could store away.

Path length or execution path length is an old assembler language saying, it means in the context I was using it, end to end response time as a result of all the stuff that has to happen to get there :)
 

milligna

milligna
The best thing about Strike Commander was the manual! Origin did some fun pack-ins back in the day and had some great designers and artists on staff.

Ultimately it was the collective Origin itself that was great for a time, not characters like CR and Garriott who think just by panhandling on the internet they can reconstitute the spirit and drive of those days.

tumblr_n7e0zqA4YI1r2inbto1_400.gifv


"I would not kickstart if I were you, avatar! Also stop taking credit for what yer Warren Spectors and Raph Kosters did!"
 
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LanceLord

LanceLord
milligna said:
The best thing about Strike Commander was the manual! Origin did some fun pack-ins back in the day and had some great designers and artists on staff.

Ultimately it was the collective Origin itself that was great for a time, not characters like CR and Garriott who think just by panhandling on the internet they can reconstitute the spirit and drive of those days.

tumblr_n7e0zqA4YI1r2inbto1_400.gifv


"I would not kickstart if I were you, avatar! Also stop taking credit for what yer Warren Spectors and Raph Kosters did!"
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Ahhh. The Guardian. Every UO Avatar's home boy back in the day. Good times!

And sadly what you said there is 100% true. That golden age in the industry (when it was new and fiercely innovative on the dev's end) is sadly over.

SotA is 100% proof of that. But at least what's left of the fan base is aware enough to acknowledge what SotA can never be. Why it could never exit its permanent state of arrested development. OTOH, the SC fan base proactively remains fiercely ignorant :(
 

Dementropy

Dementropy
LanceLord said:
Ahhh. The Guardian. Every UO Avatar's home boy back in the day. Good times!

And sadly what you said there is 100% true. That golden age in the industry (when it was new and fiercely innovative on the dev's end) is sadly over.

SotA is 100% proof of that. But at least what's left of the fan base is aware enough to acknowledge what SotA can never be. Why it could never exit its permanent state of arrested development. OTOH, the SC fan base proactively remains fiercely ignorant :(
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The SotA IP is now in the capable hands of Catnip Games.
 

milligna

milligna
Can we get Eleanor Coppola to come out of retirement and make a documentary on Star Citizen? Years ago I considered doing it myself but didn't want it to consume a decade of my life. Popping in this thread every so often is bad enough!

Failing that, Adam Curtis.

Oh my gawd, imagine that voice over footage of Chris playing Star Citizen.

Bit of Burial music playing.

"This is a story about spaceships..."

Bootcha did a fine job with the vids but we need something polished and on Netflix one day. Call it SPACE RACE or something catchy.
 
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PiLhEaD

PiLhEaD
milligna said:
...Failing that, Adam Curtis....
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How about Richard Curtis?

Hugh Grant plays Genuine Cobblers, Thandie Newton as Mrs C, with Jack Black as the other Cobblers.

Think Galaxy Quest meets Four Weddings meets Groundhog Day, with a side order of The Trial.
 
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