The Star Citizen Thread v8
- Thread starter Yaffle
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On this page, instead of Fly Now it says Play Now. Which is weird given the name of the page...
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/fly-now
Edit: I wonder if they tried to change all the Play Nows to Fly Nows but didn't do a proper job...
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Inflicted myself 1h+ of this. And my, after that nobody should argue streamer is not a real job. It IS! And a painful and exhausting one IMHO.
Well, they aren't wrong. You can play alpha 3.0... if you get a clean server at least.
But don't worry, when they get bull culling in and refactor the items, all will be golden. Trust CIG!
You'd think they have experience from when they changed the ship name that Derek leaked.
An act which not only proved he had internal contacts within CIG but also that CIG were willing to go to some degree of trouble, up to and including altering already existing promotional material, to discredit him and...in the process...made him more credible.
Hard as that may seem, CIG managed it.
Actually optimisation begins as early as possible otherwise you risk building on some pretty poor foundations. From my own experiences as a developer not just in games, you have people that optimise core stuff continuously. Ideally there should be optimisation passes, but if your getting appalling frame rates early on it should be someones focus otherwise you are testing and building features on a sub-par frame rate not to mention failing to address a fundamental problem.
CIG's early focus appeared to be assets, which is pretty unheard of - but that was about "crowd funding", seemed extremely risky from the get-go as far as I'm concerned - doesn't surprise me they've had to revisit those ship designs a number of times as they've added more game-play on detailed ship models designed to be purchased with real cash.
The problem is they don't have a "cycle" so it's always "early in development" and the industry doesn't have any benchmark against which this sort of perpetual development is acceptable. After this many years they should be putting out polished modules simply because they have taken the public's money in my opinion. Roberts himself said some six years ago that crowd funding wouldn't allow him to make vertical slice demos (as he does for publishers) and that he would build the game as polished playable Alpha releases. Instead stretching development times into the unknown, removing mile-stones and avoiding dead-lines and removing accountability using the excuse "this is normal for big games".
There doesn't seem to be much in the way of "crunch" so optimisation isn't happening and they continue to push new features upon some pretty poorly optimised ones. Bizaarly they have found a way to crowd fund the game on vertical slice demos and release something that would barely function as being suitable for a QA team to work with.
"Crunch" may be a rude word to Roberts and CIG but unfortunately the history of big projects is such that nothing just falls together casually. People have to sit down and focus on the end goal and Star Citizen doesn't seem to have one.
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It's what's staggered me with all their estimates - they seem to think they can work on all these separate things then just assemble them like so much lego and have it all work.
I mean in theory that's possible but it's god-level project management when it happens - and often a mini-upset of it's own as any sensible PM would have planned a lot of time to sort out all the conflicts
I guess "smart design" is part of the optimization process and the thing we are really discussing/complaining about is "polishing" which comes at the very end of a games development cycle yet CiG does it the other way around to get into suckers pockets.
In the beginning thats what people were thinking&expecting of CRoberts. God-like management capabilities. Its just that reality made a check and he rolled a 1
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That was one of my first red warning lamps going off way back after the kickstarter days, when they were talking about doing the game in individual "modules", and those modules would become available gradually, and would somehow just work together. Nobody thought that this was strange, it seems. I thought that surely, people will point out the fact that you can't just build an FPS, planetside and MMO "module" in parallel, which is what CIG claimed to be doing, and then somehow connect them and BAM, Star Citizen done!
It's like a kid trying to design a game, and forgetting the fact that the last 10% require 90% of the effort, and that late integration of disparate components is nigh impossible. Even back then I thought it was foolish to do what CR suggested: "We'll do the space shooty stuff first, then the walking around bits, and then we'll bolt on the landing on planets and the whole MMO thing." - Oh and it does singleplayer too, because singleplayer is basically just multiplayer without the other dudes, right?
The kickstarter rewards made this apparent.
2 million to create SQ42 and multiplayer dogfighting module (first goal).
500k to add one ship (second goal).
250k to add another ship.
100k for each new star system at 4 million... hmmm, how are they coming along?
500k for 4 new ships plus a whole load of other stuff! Erm... but previous ones required 250k or 500k each!
3 MILLION!!!!! so that backers would start with a Class 2 space suit!
1 million to move Austin devs to a bigger office. Wait? That was meant to be a kickstarter reward?
1 million to open a sound studio (erm, also apparently they said 1 million for the mocap studio as well) AND Occulus Rift support for the Hangar module! Erm... wait, Rift support? At 12 million? Where the hell did that go? Oh right, fell by the wayside.
1 million for an extra ship and a digital handbook!
Another ship costing a million....
And another...
1 million for SC's version of Shinrarta! Oh my. Earlier they were saying 100k per new system. this must be one special system!
Skipping foward quite a few now, because its all a bit silly...
Ooh, pets for 1 million!
And finally, obviously running out of ideas as to how to milk backers, ship modularity for 1 million at 65 million.
At this point CIG just stopped inventing stretch goals, probably realizing direct ship sales was a good enough way of milking as any.
Overall though, its clear they were just making up those numbers as they went along. Nobody was doing proper cost and effort estimates on those features.
Oh my, i just checked the kickstarter comments and saw this one: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/comments?cursor=19018172#comment-19018171
Basically he is saying kickstarters are not relevant and that nobody should care about those who kickstarted.
Especially this bit:
Basically saying anyone who kickstarted and is not part of the official RSI or subreddit is not part of the community. EDIT: actually also saying that those who don't participate in the forums are also not part of the community.
I find that quite scandalous.
Basically he is saying kickstarters are not relevant and that nobody should care about those who kickstarted.
Especially this bit:
Basically saying anyone who kickstarted and is not part of the official RSI or subreddit is not part of the community. EDIT: actually also saying that those who don't participate in the forums are also not part of the community.
I find that quite scandalous.
Cloud Imperium Industries?
Scrolled all the way down to the 2013 comments and am currently working my way up. Some of those comments are pure gold by now and in hindsight its apparent that marketing accounts were at work heavily even that early. All in all good amount of giggles and laughs to be had
Yes - but not as a finished product. That seems to be what CIG are going for. For a preAlpha to look and feel and play like a finished product instead of the preAlpha it is in reality. They are going for style over substance, apparently because in doing so they can persuade more people to part with more money even as they ramp up costs through what seems to be Hollywood style accounting. They are preferring to build an implement a series of polished assets they will continually have to revisit, rework, delete and rebuild rather than sit down and device a suitable design framework detailing intended gameplay mechanics or work on core systems such as the game engine.
I did so too and found this
Douglas Ally[/URL said:
This is just sooooo soooo sad... I don`t even know what to say... how can people become like this
Good call.
I'd bet it used to say "Fly Now", but says "Play Now". They would want to keep the url the same.
Also the site was redesigned somewhat recently and that section is part of the redesign that is supposed to make the website easier for new players.
Looks like Skaddens have filed the latest rebuttal.
As much as I can read or make any interpretation, it appears to say "Everything the other side said is wrong, uses invalid arguments and case law, is waffly and silly and we respectfully request the court tell them to jog on..."
As much as I can read or make any interpretation, it appears to say "Everything the other side said is wrong, uses invalid arguments and case law, is waffly and silly and we respectfully request the court tell them to jog on..."
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