The Star Citizen Thread v5

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For the love of god why can't they give a bug changelist that someone other than their devs & qa can understand ?!
I've looked through some changelogs in my time and I've not seen any public one that says stuff like that.

Is this how it's going to be always? I mean even when the whole huge thing is online and we've got 10 million ppl playing it?
 
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"Gamecode"

Saw that. Looks to me like a random label for 'all sorts of stuff we know needs doing, but don't actually want to admit to'. Or just a random label to impress the less knowledgeable citizens. Not something any serious developer would put on an internal schedule.
 
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Saw that. Looks to me like a random label for 'all sorts of stuff we know needs doing, but don't actually want to admit to'. Or just a random label to impress the less knowledgeable citizens. Not something any serious developer would put on an internal schedule.

The breakdown of the four tasks is brilliant:
• Star Marine → Bugfixing
• Network → Megamap, Serialised variable
• UI → Lobby fixes, Screen ratios, AC ship customiser, Bugfixing & polish
• Gamecode → Bugfixing

Highly informative.
 
Unless you ONLY mean WC games but MOST older games i would say a lot of them had GREAT storylines and I would love remakes of them.

Wing Commander games were good, Privateer was better. Gameplay in WC3-4 was actually WORSE mainly since they decided to remove cockpits and have the floating HUD instead. It no longer felt like flying a ship.

Not just that, but more importantly they removed the inertia. In WC 1 and 2 the ships would slide in turns. In 3 and 4 they flew like they were on rails, which made the experience rubbish. Prophecy brought back the proper WC flight model.
 
Quality will always be our number one goal. We set out on this journey by looking at the gaming landscape and asking: can we do better? We continue to ask that question about everything we do. As a result, we will ALWAYS extend timelines or re-do features and content if we do not feel they are up to our standards. The freedom to fight for a new level of quality in game development is what crowd funding has allowed us, and we will continue to fight to make sure Star Citizen is the best possible game it can be.

Let me translate:

Quality will always be our number one goal. We set out on this journey by copying other game developers and asking: How can we hide what we stole? We continue to ask that question about everything we do.
As a result, we will ALWAYS redo our crap and content if someone do better than us. The freedom to suck the gamers dry has reached a new level of quality in "game development" and we will continue to make sure Star Citizen NEVER will be released.
 
Quality will always be our number one goal. We set out on this journey by looking at the gaming landscape and asking: can we do better? We continue to ask that question about everything we do. As a result, we will ALWAYS extend timelines or re-do features and content if we do not feel they are up to our standards. The freedom to fight for a new level of quality in game development is what crowd funding has allowed us, and we will continue to fight to make sure Star Citizen is the best possible game it can be.
Wow.

These guys are truly incompetent and unsuited for software any kind of development project.
 
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Internal schedules, the ones you will now be privy to, tend to have aggressive dates to help the team focus and scope their tasks

Ouch! Do i not like that! That is not how we do it. We set as realistic dates as possible, which is a near impossibility but on average it means that some tasks are overestimates while some are underestimated meaning delivery dates are usually fairly realsitic. It doesn't help the team focus, it puts unrealsitic expectations on them and adds unecessary levels of stress.
 
The problem is they haven't released a single thing so far which they can (or will) point to and say "this is finished to the standard we are aiming for". Partly because everything they've released so far is just different shades of bad, but also because they absolutely don't want to draw that line and have people be disappointed with the "finished" product. Even CIG knows that's the inevitable conclusion.

But the kicker is when it says "we will ALWAYS ... re-do features and content if we do not feel they are up to our standards". Because if they're redoing things, it means they failed to get it right the first time. Or the second, or third in some cases. If absolutely nothing has been finished to their standards after all this time then there's no evidence they're even capable of getting it right. Never mind how they're already chasing their own tail as more and more other games appear which set the bar that bit higher.

Still, "we will continue to fight to make sure Star Citizen is the best possible game it can be" isn't really saying much. Maybe 2.6.1 is the best SC can possibly be, in the circumstances.
 
Ouch! Do i not like that! That is not how we do it. We set as realistic dates as possible, which is a near impossibility but on average it means that some tasks are overestimates while some are underestimated meaning delivery dates are usually fairly realsitic. It doesn't help the team focus, it puts unrealsitic expectations on them and adds unecessary levels of stress.

Indeed, why would you even treat your staff like this, the pressure it would put them under is insane, like saying 3.0 by the end of the year...
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Ouch! Do i not like that! That is not how we do it. We set as realistic dates as possible, which is a near impossibility but on average it means that some tasks are overestimates while some are underestimated meaning delivery dates are usually fairly realsitic. It doesn't help the team focus, it puts unrealsitic expectations on them and adds unecessary levels of stress.

To be honest in the project management component of the industry where my professional background comes from we set internal team targets on a more aggressive timeline than would be the expected mean or expected median, after all we aim to be best in class and time = cost. But we always keep them realistic. Challenging but realistic.

Having said that, especially for the most complex projects with a lot of uncertainties and dependencies we use probabilistic analysis in the creation of such schedules, using past projects (or past tasks within a same project) benchmark times including some elements of contingency. We learn from the past.

This in turn generates probability curves that show the different range of possible outcomes for the total duration of a given task, or the overall project. We then use those curves for target setting and discussions with different stakeholders. I would not expect the software industry related project management discipline be too dissimilar.

For example we would use somewhere between the P30 to P50 times (i.e 30% or 50% chance that the actual final time be equal or less than that P30 or P50) for our own team goals, bonuses, etc. We would use somewhere between P50 to P75 for approving viability of projects internally. And then we would use P75 to P90 or so to discuss with external stakeholders, authorities, stock market, lenders etc.

But CIG is not doing project management, and it does not want to (or can´t) use past learnings... 6 years of them. They are simply (and most likely knowingly) failing consistently to meet any and all of the timelines they put out there (i.e. they are using an extremely low PX in their announcements, very close to P0). CIG is simply looking at the most efficient dates in terms of marketing, news cycle and imminency related hype to maximize pledges. And then see what they can do to deliver "some content" in that time frame.

lognormal-distributions.png
 
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The problem is they haven't released a single thing so far which they can (or will) point to and say "this is finished to the standard we are aiming for". Partly because everything they've released so far is just different shades of bad, but also because they absolutely don't want to draw that line and have people be disappointed with the "finished" product. Even CIG knows that's the inevitable conclusion.

But the kicker is when it says "we will ALWAYS ... re-do features and content if we do not feel they are up to our standards". Because if they're redoing things, it means they failed to get it right the first time. Or the second, or third in some cases. If absolutely nothing has been finished to their standards after all this time then there's no evidence they're even capable of getting it right. Never mind how they're already chasing their own tail as more and more other games appear which set the bar that bit higher.

Still, "we will continue to fight to make sure Star Citizen is the best possible game it can be" isn't really saying much. Maybe 2.6.1 is the best SC can possibly be, in the circumstances.

This sums the problem up perfectly. How can we continue having confidence in the project with ever changing Sisyphus-esque dev philosophy? how can we see project management people trustworthy? They promise the moon, they can't even get to cross the street : they want to be better than the others, they can't even make the most mundane functionality work reliably.

It's totally "infinite monkey" improvised kind of development. It's worrying. I didn't backed for this.
 
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It doesn't help the team focus, it puts unrealsitic expectations on them and adds unecessary levels of stress.

I think pretty much everyone who has been involved in a project will understand that setting unrealistic goals is setting the team up for failure, and serves only to demotivate the team when they consistently fail to hit their goals, possibly having put in extra hours to try to hit those unachievable goals.

This is the project management style of the incompetent autocrat.
 
To be honest in the project management component of the industry where my professional background comes from we set internal team targets on a more aggressive timeline than would be the expected mean or expected median, after all we aim to be best in class and time = cost. But we always keep them realistic. Challenging but realistic.

Having said that, especially for the most complex projects with a lot of uncertainties and dependencies we use probabilistic analysis in the creation of such schedules, using past projects (or past tasks within a same project) benchmark times including some elements of contingency. We learn from the past.

This in turn generates probability curves that show the different range of possible outcomes for the total duration of a given task, or the overall project. We then use those curves for target setting and discussions with different stakeholders. I would not expect the software industry related project management discipline be too dissimilar.

For example we would use somewhere between the P30 to P50 times (i.e 30% or 50% chance that the actual final time be equal or less than that P30 or P50) for our own team goals, bonuses, etc. We would use somewhere between P50 to P75 for approving viability of projects internally. And then we would use P75 to P90 or so to discuss with external stakeholders, authorities, stock market, lenders etc.

But CIG is not doing project management, and it does not want to (or can´t) use past learnings... 6 years of them. They are simply (and most likely knowingly) failing consistently to meet any and all of the timelines they put out there (i.e. they are using an extremely low PX in their announcements, very close to P0). CIG is simply looking at the most efficient dates in terms of marketing, news cycle and imminency related hype to maximize pledges. And then see what they can do to deliver "some content" in that time frame.


I'm a professional PM myself, and you're right, it's just a pile of mumbo jumbo buzz words they use. We do set very tight targets and the top management always push to get stuff done faster.
Our job is to be realistic, to protect the team involved and to make sure safety is not at risk.

Projects have two variables, time or cost we mostly use the former as a skeleton for our projects.
 
I'm a professional PM myself, and you're right, it's just a pile of mumbo jumbo buzz words they use. We do set very tight targets and the top management always push to get stuff done faster.
Our job is to be realistic, to protect the team involved and to make sure safety is not at risk.

Well there you go. How can you expect to innovate and produce stuff no-one ever has with an attitude like that! You're part of the problem. ;)
 
See, this is why I have such a overall negative opinion of this whole project now when CIG come out and pull off stuff like this.

It's signs like these ones which set off the alarm bells for people with a more realistic to sceptical outlook to the prospects of Star Citizen et all ever seeing the light of day, or at least, in a form that was being boasted about constantly for the last few years. Even when CIG are attempting to be "more open" with their plans for the games' further development, it still comes off being very vague, confusing and, worryingly, raising more questions about the actual competence levels of the people guiding this whole thing.

That updated timeline thing from yesterday? It doesn't give you anything but the most generalized idea of what CIG are working on and hope to accomplish in the time constraints they gave themselves. It's there to give the *impression* of progress, when actually very little *real* progress has happened in the last couple of months, outside of more promotional drives and ship concepts. And that character customization tech demo they showed off? Lame! Graphical fidelity maybe, but again, not something that is remotely near being game ready of even stable enough to work with and test. It was purely put out there to try and minimize the further reputation damage being dealt by that *other* space game that has recently released a beta patch which includes the same functionality.... in-game!

All of these things should be rather glaring red flags for the more, shall we say, 'optimistic' about Star Citizen's future prospects. But then again, I suppose that it's not my place to say what people like that should believe, or what their expectations should be, so whatever I guess.
 
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