Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

n4p0l3on

N
EUS said:
This whole scam is perfectly encapsulated by the video of CR flinging his hands around like a spaz.
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the legendary hand wave!


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hairychris

hairychris
[VR] Mr Teatime said:
It might be worth playing back some history here and looking at "intent" from a development perspective.

Back in 2012/13 CryEngine was a fairly decent FPS engine that allowed linked levels, had a good SDK with decent enough tools, a great rendering engine and was being actively worked on and improved as new features were being added to DirectX e.g. tessellation in DX11 and POM (Parallax Occlusion Mapping).
The levels you could produce with CryEngine were pretty large compared to most FPS engines (IDx, the COD versions of IDx, Unreal etc.), but it had major limitations, which a few days worth of serious investigation should uncover. Namely texture streaming going very funky away from the grid origin, plus positional rounding errors and ergo physics. Most of these were due to the 32bit coord system being used at the time.

It's also worth bearing in mind that a 32bit coord system doesn't give you a lot of room in the simulation arena, as the map area let's say for modern jet combat will have you detecting targets at say 60miles, using BVR weapons tactics (Beyond Visual Range) from detection down to visual range (<10 miles) and dogfighting from then on. The most you can stretch CryEngine to out of the box is about 20miles. Merging will happen very quickly in a box that size. Also if you want very high levels of detail you can "fool" the coord system by making everything oversized, but in scale with each other, but you shrink the world coord system even further by doing that (to say the same sort of size as the Arena Commander).

Now you could say a developer, who is unfamiliar with CryEngine and looking for an engine to develop a new game that has small arenas (<5mile cube), could and probably would come across the SDK, download it for free and without actually trying that hard, think "yeah this has all the shiny stuff gamers like and I can make a product with it". In fact if you look at the CryEngine development forums, it is littered with folks who do exactly that and some of the demos and creations look fantastic, but 99.9% don't end up as products.

If you were looking at said CryEngine as a flight or space sim developer then you might try and load in some terrain and try a few hacks to get a decent sized map, but ultimately you end up looking at coding a great deal i.e. you need a 64bit (double float) world coords plus all the dependant baggage in the rest of the engine that will have to be "fixed" as a result. What will be needed therefore is almost a new engine with retention of some areas like rendering, light and shading routines, POM etc. This is where I was personally when looking at a possible successor to a commercially and technically successful modern combat flight sim in 2012/13.

Here's the stinger though:

If you were say embedded or involved with CryTek/CryEngine at a corporate/professional development level during 2012/13, then you would either have to be a complete idiot or wilfully negligent in believing you could produce a large scale flight or space sim, without a ground up re-write of CryEngine.
A day's worth of due diligence with the SDK would easily give you a list of project workstreams that would need completion just to get a decent BVR to merge play arena going, let alone one where you want GTA meets Elite Dangerous meets Eve Online.

The sad thing is the folk who have invested $300million+ in this fantasy, have probably given enough funding to develop such an engine, provided they could sit on their impatience for a decade or so and have no playable demo or product. It appears however that rather than getting the engine and hence the product, they have invested in, they have instead had delivered one of the most successful "investment" generation schemes since Madoff's i.e. a large proportion of the $300million+ looks like it has been generating the $300million+ and not the actual product.

Full disclosure: I nearly kickstarted SC at the same time as I kickstarted Elite Dangerous and off of the back of videos back then by Jingles and Jester814. Then I learned it was based on CryEngine and backed immediately out of there, knowing that SC would need a new engine as complex as COBRA/Stellarforge or VU2 (the engine in the product I produced), both of which had/have been in development since the early 1990's and you could say arguably still don't realise their full potential, but are the best there is currently.
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You're not wrong!

Pretty much all of this was under discussion here a few years back... CryEngine at the time was the prettiest on the market so Roberts got CryTek to build the SC pitch demo and he was locked on that path. The 32 bit addressing issue (and Roberts' claim that it was a simple switch to make) was the source of significant hilarity.

And 7 years down the line CIG are stuck with an outdated mutant of an engine that's fundamentally unfit for a MMO-like game.

And yeah. There's a stage that something gets to when it turns from a moon-shot of a project to deliberate scam when that moon-shot proves impossible but money is still being taken to cover the technical debt.
 

Fishy

Fishy
sovapid said:
Y'all keep saying this, yet the only "real" MMO i've ever played was built off of cryengine. Archage.

:ROFLMAO:
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Archeage was dog****. Some neat concepts with crafting and trade goods, but a ty boring fantasy 101 universe, horrible labour system, and some of the worst mmo implementation choices I've ever seen (bow FPS reverse scaling with server ping, that's some netcode right there).

In its favour however, the player-driven public trial system was absolutely hilarious and one of the most brilliant mmo concepts I've ever seen. One guy got away with blanket murder simply because he stated his case as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air tune. I can still hear bits of it in my head "When a couple of greens, that were up to no good, started making trouble in my neighbourhood". 😂
 
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McGlashan

McGlashan
MTBFritz said:
I dont really care what Chris Roberts honest thoughts is in all this. He wont be able to plead insanity or similar to escape a verdict. And while legal verdicts have to be proven to get any traction the same doesnt count for opinions or small-scale private verdicts (aka reputation). That so many people see Star Citizen as a scam is the result of its development history and community interaction.
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I was thinking that he's gotten away with it before, why not this time? But then I realised his previous failures occurred before the golden age of social media (that's "golden" in the "shower" sense), when the majority of the information available to fans came from the sorts of paid magazine puff pieces that are seen now for what they are. You had to be a bit more "in the know" to get the insider scoop on how badly he had messed something up (which was why I for one didn't really have any idea until it all came out in the SC wash). There was no DS scrupulously and publicly documenting every wrong turn in real time (before he gave it up in favour of becoming some sort of deluded armchair political commentator).

It's not the transparency Roberts touted, or wanted, but it's definitely the transparency he deserves, and I hope it serves as a warning to anyone considering going into business with him in the future. Unfortunately those people are probably more interested in the $300m+ he successfuly managed to vacuum out of the community than what he did or didn't deliver in return.
 
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