The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Stigbob]

I think what's important with the CIG/Illfonic debacle is not who said what but why on earth was it not even confirmed? Did no one even think that it might be important to double check before things went too far?

All Chris had to say about the matter is "I thought we were all on the same page." How does that fly? Can you imagine saying that to your boss over an expensive subcontract, "I thought...." the obvious response being "Clearly you did not think because otherwise you would have checked."

Quoting myself from last September :

Contracting out a large portion of work (star marine) then failing to specify something as important as scale and not noticing it was wrong for two years is not normal.

Basically either the wrong information was given out, nobody took notes at any of the multiple meetings contract negotiations and follow up progress meetings, nobody bothered to send around a quick e-mail with minutes for everyone to see and correct if necessary. Or whoever did keep notes was so self important that they buried the real information in 30 pages of unreadable pointless drivel to stroke their own ego and feel important about creating a big important document. Or the notes were shredded because they showed the head honcho gave out the wrong information.

Either way the person in charge isn't actually in charge, and everyone below them either ignores this sort of obvious error because they don't care if it goes wrong or they're scared to point out an issue because the bosses find that threatening.

I guarantee anyone whose ever worked somewhere toxic has seen this kind of thing before and knows that these problems can't be fixed quickly or easily.

 

[LeSabre]

In the end it does not matter - was it poor choice of dev by CR or CR FAIL to communicate with Illfonic...

But what matters is everything was delayed like allways past 3 years or more...

I believe that the official line on the reason for the first SM fail was CIG changed their scaling and then there was a failure to communicate this to Illfonic who naturally just went about their business of attempting to create an fps game mode unaware of the changes.

I can't remember where I saw that tbh, I'm sure someone will turn it up.

Ah see above as I didn't get as far as Stigs post

 

[GaryII]

I believe that the official line on the reason for the first SM fail was CIG changed their scaling and then there was a failure to communicate this to Illfonic who naturally just went about their business of attempting to create an fps game mode unaware of the changes.

Yes, this one is very popular rumor, but I guess there is no official info about this from CIG nor from Illfonic..

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Yes, this one is very popular rumor, but I guess there is no official info about this from CIG nor from Illfonic..

Was/wasn't this any way confirmed in Kotaku articles? I remember there was section about falling out between CIG and Illfonic. Official confirmation might never come though.

 

[Cotic]

Was/wasn't this any way confirmed in Kotaku articles? I remember there was section about falling out between CIG and Illfonic. Official confirmation might never come though.

That's correct, it's under the "The problem with contractors" section of http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen

The plan was to build ship and station interiors from environment kits. For this to work, a source explained, “you need to have the same slottable pieces for all different types of art styles. All standard doors, for example, whether they be for a moon base or a mars base, have to share the same dimensions. If you’re building a new environment and new art assets to go with it then you create them as standard, modular pieces so other environments in the same style can be built quickly without needing bespoke assets.”

CIG wanted to use the environment assets Illfonic had created for its Gold Horizon space station level as an environment kit. But when CIG tried to fit the assets into their levels, they found that none of the assets worked with CIG’s kit system; they had all been built to the wrong scale. A source told me that after the studio had worked on the Gold Horizon map for more than a year, CIG asked Illfonic’s artists to remake the whole thing with new metrics to satisfy the Squadron 42 team. “It sucked for the artists,” my source told me.

“I'm always very perplexed by this,” Roberts responds, when I ask him how this deviation had happened. “We got everyone together and had a whole art summit in Austin in 2013. I thought we were all on the same page but I guess at some point we weren't, because I started to hear back from the environment guys that 'this thing doesn't fit with what we're doing.’ The communication wasn't good, but it was also a problem because there wasn't one person in charge of all of that.”

In short, no one person was in a position to spot deviation before it became too severe. This wasted months of work and necessitated months more to correct the problem. Illfonic worked on Star Marine for nearly two years, but production issues like the one above have meant that nothing it worked on has been released, and much of what it did create has been rewritten by CIG.

 

[Dooguk]

Yes, this one is very popular rumor, but I guess there is no official info about this from CIG nor from Illfonic..

I heard Chris came into work one Monday morning after a weekend browsing the interweb.

"Hey you. Yes you typing in front of the TV on your desk. I was watching Braben on YouTube, and he says his game has a scale of 1:1. What is the scale of ours?"

"Errr it's 1:1 boss"

"That's not good enough. I want ours bigger"

"How much bigger boss?"

"3 times bigger should do. The mug....eh backers will love that. And Braben will be furious, but he's not getting a refund for that. So make it 1:3 alright"

"But boss 1:3 is smal........"

"Nevermind BUT! Get it done. NOW!"

 

[Asp Explorer]

While you are at it - make it even MOAR bigger! I want that Idris to be the size of a football field!

 

[thorn-]

Whilst we debate the endless wait for the will it/won't it simulator Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous is getting played by CohhCarnage on Twitch, with over 6000 people watching.... And he's having fun with the game too.

Meanwhile, Star Citizen is at 786 watchers *total* with the 18 players currently playing the game on Twitch.

The spin could also be: More people watch someone else play Elite, instead of playing Elite.

 

[CmdrKull]

The spin could also be: More people watch someone else play Elite, instead of playing Elite.

I log a lot of hours in elite, but I still like to watch obsidian ant play. It's just the idea of seeing someone else's perspective, seeing some far-off corner of the PG galaxy that I might not be able to easily get to, or especially seeing something like PVP piracy that I am, honestly here, not very good at.

 

[LeSabre]

That's correct, it's under the "The problem with contractors" section of http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen

Yeah, sounds about right really considering CR's consistant vagueness when it comes to describing things, imagine what it's like to work for someone who can't articulate a design parameter or gets annoyed easily when asked for specifics.

 

[Stigbob]

The spin could also be: More people watch someone else play Elite, instead of playing Elite.

The spin could also also be more people play elite because it was released on time and isn't a scam.

 

[Asylum]

What I find interesting about the date revisionism is that fans are always proclaiming that CR can take all the time he needs, that there is no rush, that a delayed game is better, so on and so forth.

But as soon as someone says that development started in 2011 or 2012, they go wild and declare it only being in development for 3 years and not 4 (or 5), all of a sudden the duration of Star Citizen's development becomes very important.

One of many logic bombs that just make me go......huh?!

boom

 

[milligna]

"They weren't at full strength then!"

Ignoring the fact that most projects start with small teams before ratcheting up to full speed and manpower. It's NORMAL.

 

[frostypaw]

I think what's important with the CIG/Illfonic debacle is not who said what but why on earth was it not even confirmed? Did no one even think that it might be important to double check before things went too far?

All Chris had to say about the matter is "I thought we were all on the same page." How does that fly? Can you imagine saying that to your boss over an expensive subcontract, "I thought...." the obvious response being "Clearly you did not think because otherwise you would have checked."

Precisely. It makes my skin crawl how ready people are to excuse poor management as someone else's fault. The entire reason for the manager's existence is to MANAGE it. If it goes wrong they are that ship's captain and the buck stops there for everything that's not caught - obviously that doesn't mean immediate beheading but the failure should be owned.

Imagine how that pans out over many studios in different countries and so many teams. I suspect that's why we see a lot of pretty snazzy tech demos that don't make it in.

 

[Dooguk]

The Agent over at SA has this.

hello

all of these are god knows how credible
chris roberts is transitioning away from any game or art design to focus more on company matters
someone close to chris (sean tracy??) will be handling all end stage design and art approvals
expect 3.0 features in 2018 at the minimum
sqlude is still scheduled for this year
sqlude is working off a different engine branch than 2.6/3.0 (???)
mocapped assets are undergoing redesigns (again)
some mocapped characters have changed due to rewrites, causing dialogue to be re-recorded
crawling/wall/fast attacking vanduul were too "problematic," will now stand and fire normally
AI still broken (shooting through walls, instakilling the player, animations not firing correctly, spazzing out into the great beyond on death anim)
netcode still broken
updated design docs are forthcoming and will detail some "minor" changes to scope
larger ships with full player crews will be hamstrung fighting against AI ships until problems are fixed
larger battles are still not possible (2018/2019 minimum) and SC will focus more on smaller player driven skirmishes
end year sales "barely put our nostrils above water"

 

[Neo-ST]

The Agent over at SA has this.

hello

all of these are god knows how credible
chris roberts is transitioning away from any game or art design to focus more on company matters
someone close to chris (sean tracy??) will be handling all end stage design and art approvals
expect 3.0 features in 2018 at the minimum
sqlude is still scheduled for this year
sqlude is working off a different engine branch than 2.6/3.0 (???)
mocapped assets are undergoing redesigns (again)
some mocapped characters have changed due to rewrites, causing dialogue to be re-recorded
crawling/wall/fast attacking vanduul were too "problematic," will now stand and fire normally
AI still broken (shooting through walls, instakilling the player, animations not firing correctly, spazzing out into the great beyond on death anim)
netcode still broken
updated design docs are forthcoming and will detail some "minor" changes to scope
larger ships with full player crews will be hamstrung fighting against AI ships until problems are fixed
larger battles are still not possible (2018/2019 minimum) and SC will focus more on smaller player driven skirmishes
end year sales "barely put our nostrils above water"

Looks like they're doing great.
Aren't they, Orlando ?

Spoiler

 

[Asylum]

Yeah, sounds about right really considering CR's consistant vagueness when it comes to describing things, imagine what it's like to work for someone who can't articulate a design parameter or gets annoyed easily when asked for specifics.

But he uses his hands and is so charmingly animated....when he explains himself

- - - Updated - - -

The Agent over at SA has this.

hello

all of these are god knows how credible
chris roberts is transitioning away from any game or art design to focus more on company matters
someone close to chris (sean tracy??) will be handling all end stage design and art approvals
expect 3.0 features in 2018 at the minimum
sqlude is still scheduled for this year
sqlude is working off a different engine branch than 2.6/3.0 (???)
mocapped assets are undergoing redesigns (again)
some mocapped characters have changed due to rewrites, causing dialogue to be re-recorded
crawling/wall/fast attacking vanduul were too "problematic," will now stand and fire normally
AI still broken (shooting through walls, instakilling the player, animations not firing correctly, spazzing out into the great beyond on death anim)
netcode still broken
updated design docs are forthcoming and will detail some "minor" changes to scope
larger ships with full player crews will be hamstrung fighting against AI ships until problems are fixed
larger battles are still not possible (2018/2019 minimum) and SC will focus more on smaller player driven skirmishes
end year sales "barely put our nostrils above water"

Jezuz (with a grain of salt)

 

[Dooguk]

'chris roberts is transitioning away from any game or art design to focus more on company matters'

Planning his escape perhaps? Pile of clothes on a beach? Overturned yacht?

 

[Komemiute]

Funny. At one time I was in doubt if you were really talking about Chris Roberts. Based on what I have seen so far in SC your scenario could fit him so well aswell.

Completely agree. It sort of backfired in the most precise and fitting way.

 

[CMDR_Orlando]

Seems rather apt considering some of his "backers"...

Not my words but also rather apt considering most of the Star Citizen haters fall back into the "dense" imbroglio of half-truths and falsehoods while not understanding the the basics of crowdfunding, game development, alpha testing and pushing for the reminiscence of the IGN comments section from 2012 in perpetual motion until the goal post is moved, from "vaporware" to "scam" to "no game just a tech demo" to "clearly pre-rendered on rails not live" into "collapse in 90 days top" to "any day now layoffs incoming" but oh wait "yeah but development started in 2011" and "all they have is 140 millions and no game" into "its a buggy tech demo with eva, fps, multicrew that provide no fun" oh and "flight model ongoing for 5 years", "an alpha with bugs and glitches, absolutely reprehensible imo" such amateurism these game dev's 100+years of game dev experience combined and they can't even make a ultra ambitious Single Player + Online game at the same time, buhuhuhu. [squeeeee]

In "other" news:

Bugsmashers Episode:
[video=youtube;YEl4ABpTTdw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEl4ABpTTdw[/video]

Berdu lends its video-game photography skills to Star Citizen to produce some stunning shots: https://imgur.com/a/ZPmBP

Spoiler

Cutlass Racing got a boost with 2.6:

Spoiler

[video=youtube;xn56PzTZ04M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn56PzTZ04M[/video]

Cya in the Verse Citizens!