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Derek Smart DEREK SMART DEREK SMART
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Jan 1, 2016 14:51
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xanif posted:Like this Sooooo quote:"It was incredibly toxic. I had to get out." Every game developer that ever was or will be, then? That literally describes all of them.
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Jan 1, 2016 19:31
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Bacon Terrorist posted:I can't wait to buy in for cheap and fly my piece of poo poo ship into some sperg' thousand dollar white elephant, drinking their space tears. If the game doesn't release, the tears taste the same. I'm all in with my Aurora. It's the ticket price to watch this go down, with popcorn.
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Jan 1, 2016 19:37
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Oh if only they had made the game as described at the end of the Kickstarter and stopped selling JPG ships this could have been something. All I wanted was a loving multiplayer bridge commander, pretty much. That's it. You'd think blending FPS ship movement with a space environment outside wouldn't be that hard. It doesn't have to be perfect, I don't have to have a SEAMLESS EXPERIENCE. I'm OK teleporting out of a ship to walk around a FPS base or something. Basically I just wanted a Privateer with first person elements and mutlicrew multiplayer. That's it. How did they cock that up?
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Jan 2, 2016 12:20
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Tujague posted:That's seriously Derek Smart posting on SA? Is his account here part of the settlement from the dozens of ferocious lawsuits he was going to file? Is GBS the place on the internet he can enjoy the highest amount of both relevance and respect? Because we're having the big internet crossover event one of SA's oldest and most entertaining foes has returned as an ally against a greater evil It's beautiful PS: Many coke machines will be slain this day
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Jan 2, 2016 12:27
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I miss when semi-talented musicians used to be on SA, we totally need a ballad of Smart and Roberts
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Jan 2, 2016 12:52
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kikkelivelho posted:From the beginning Chris has spoken of a seamless experience and that's also what the community wants. Star Citizen 2.0 clearly demonstrates that this experience is not only possible, but happening right now. My MechWarrior clan (which pretty much stopped playing MechWarrior at peak pants-making GBS threads at PGI) tried to play just about every build of SC to see if we could make a game night of it. The flight mechanics were loving terrible and the whole game devolves into who can ram the other guy first, because the gunplay is awful. Did any of that poo poo improve in 2.0? I don't feel like downloading my entire monthly cap for it.
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Jan 2, 2016 18:12
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AbRASiON posted:He didn't, it was more than just Wing Commander. I'm someone who grew up in that era, when Star Wars was huge, X-Wing and Tie Fighter were huge, he put out 3 pretty decent Wing Commander games (1,2,3) plus Privateer. This is a myth. The best WC games were 2, 4 and Privateer. Chris Roberts only directly worked on 1 & 3 and was marginally involved with 4. ED: I mentioned it earlier but that's why Hobbes tossed out every big of character development to turn traitor in 3, Chris Roberts didn't like the Kilrathi having depth and pissed on the character. I doubt anyone has it, but there were a bunch of interviews with the developers of Privateer in particular who commented that they basically never met Chris Roberts at all. Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 05:01
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Does anybody have the old WC: Privateer or WC2 strategy guides? I think that's where a lot of the interviews were explaining Roberts lack of involvement in those games. For those that don't remember 80s/90s strategy guides, they used to be loaded with tons of fluff, extra features, expanded backgrounds, etc. and weren't pure and utter poo poo that Gamefaq replaced. At least the WC ones were, I didn't buy many.
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Jan 3, 2016 05:24
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Ayn Randi posted:wing commander is old and poo poo but when you never mentally reach adulthood i guess fetishising your childhood experiences in perpetuity makes sesne I think it's less that, and more that it was a good formula for a game and nobody seems to get it right since; it pioneered a lot of things about cinematics and stuff like dynamic sound and in a lot of ways the whole genre went backwards. It'd be like if they just flat out stopped making first person shooters after Quake, and people really want another first person shooter. I've yet to play a space game that put you in a storyline or universe quite as well as WC since; even Privateer which broke with the formula did everything it could to really bring the universe to life. Where as every single space game I've played post-Wing Commander (not counting Prophecy which had great gameplay and blew chunks in every other way thanks to EA's poor direction and sudden shifts) has felt clinical, by the numbers, and like it's trying to be a Microsoft Flight Simulator game in space. Only X-Wing and TIE Fighter ever really approached the formula and even future attempts at them sucked. So this really, truly isn't just nostalgia that has people wanting this. It's just people wanting a formula that actually worked back. It's one of those few series that I think is a classic as it gets older; it wasn't some bad game that people have nostalgia goggles for. If it were a movie instead of a game, it'd probably play on the classic movie station all the time. .... that said, again, Chris Roberts had almost nothing to do with the biggest and best games in said franchise. Privateer in particular had absolutely nothing to do with him aside from a production credit for creating the universe, for name value; he basically had as much to do with Privateer as George Lucas had with the new Star Wars movie. He created the basic ideas, but that's where it ends. ED: If someone sings the praises of Privateer 2 they're insane. The only thing that had going for it was being an acid-trip of a British sci-fi show staring Clive Owen. Watch it on youtube and never ever play that game. Privateer 2 was the direct baby of Erin Roberts, who took over and replaced the original Privateer team. I've always had a bit of a bias against Erin Roberts and I'm pretty sure I've posted saying he's a terrible hanger-on on this very forum years before Star Citizen even was a thing. Fun Fact: Erin Roberts tried to claim Privateer 2 took place in the Wing Commander universes "far future." Except there were no Kilrathi, no other aliens, everything was using trippy tech, the galaxy got way smaller and I don't think Earth existed. EA was smart enough to rip "Wing Commander" off the game's title right before release, against Erin's wishes. I'm surprised he doesn't get more flak from that. Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 13:03
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Holy gently caress tracking down Credit information or interviews regarding the pre-internet Privateer are rough. I was surprised to see Erin Robert's name as the lead developer on Wikipedia. "That can't be right," I thought. And lo, it was not right, as I dug up the original manual: The actual lead was named Joel Manners. Erin Roberts was only an Associate Producer, and much like Chris Roberts, did jack poo poo except collect a producer credit. I am shocked how hard that fact was to find. Basically had to get the Privateer manual PDF and look through it. ED: Interestingly enough, while he's not had any major hits since, he's at least still working in the industry as of a couple years ago (and probably still is, just his last credit) so that's nice to see. Someone should really fix Wikipedia. http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,3794/ ED: Also google Ares Rising. Almost all the key players behind Privateer made their own studio to make that, and to be honest, I barely remember hearing about it. Is it a lost gem or did it turn out crap? Either way, that's likely why Erin ended up loving Privateer 2. All I could find was a single review that kept bitching about how the graphics weren't apart of this amazing new 3D acceleration and kept praising the game in other ways followed by "BUT I DON'T LIKE THE GRAPHICS." Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 13:17
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I see Chris Roberts is also crediting himself as lead designer on Wing Commander 4. Again, he was not: It goes to Anthony Morone. Once again, just an executive producer credit for Roberts, he wasn't even the active producer. He had jack all to do with 4. gently caress it, I'm editing Wikipedia but I expect the loyal legions of Robert-fan wikieditors will fix it back. Anyone know how to cite a user manual before they cry about citations? ED: I am starting to think I'm the only person who played these games in the 90s with an accurate view of Chris Roberts actual involvement. It might have been because I got really annoyed with WC3 despite it's technology jump and used to read all the resources I could get, and those resources have been since become nearly impossible to track down. Now it seems like everyone's under the impression he made all of these games. I guess it took years for people to realize George Lucas didn't direct the last two Star Wars movies. Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 13:45
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Robo Reagan posted:who cares I only care because people are effectively riding the success of things they had jack poo poo to do with. "From the guy who brought you Wing Commander 1 (not the expansions), Wing Commander 3 and did we mention Wing Commander 1?" isn't nearly as impressive a pitch. Adding in "And his brother, who hosed the Privateer franchise out of existence entirely" doesn't help; doubly so when somebody is advertising him as the creator of Privateer 1 incorrectly. I'm really surprised this never really came up much. ED: For what it's worth Chris Roberts did direct the film segments in WC4. That's where it begins and ends. Given he'd botch the movie not long after, I can only assume he wanted to transition to film making at this point. Hell I'm not even trying to beat up on Chris Roberts here as much as that's welcomed, I just think it's pretty lovely that the actual people who did these things aren't getting their due credit while others are being assigned credit for it. Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 13:51
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Falloutboy posted:Huh, I always thought he was the brainchild behind WC 2. His loose involvement with the series kinda explains why the WC movie was complete poo poo and deviated from the game. I read in several interviews during the day that Chris Roberts hated Wing Commander 2's whole storyline. Like loving hated it. To the point one of the big reasons he came back to to WC3 was to hard-reset everything he hated. Given Hobbes was one of the better written game characters at the time, I thought that was pretty lovely and I am 99% sure I remember reading that the original writers thought it was pretty lovely too. Notably those characters were in fact started in an expansion for WC1.. but one Roberts had nothing to do with. I should note by video game writing standards, WC2 was actually above cut by a good margin. By 90s video game standards, it was loving Citizen Kane. So it just makes it more baffling. ED: For those that aren't older than dirt, the Hobbes thing was basically the writers giving the Kilrathi depth beyond "WE ARE ANGRY SPACECATS" and they spent three expansions and a game building this character up. Roberts came along and pulled a "NOPE," made him immediately be a traitor all along, you see, because Kilrathi are all one-note and then also dumped every bit of attempted depth they had like a sinking ship. This warning sign would carry over into that crap movie. A lot of people at the time thought it was a dumb as hell twist, but it got to be a pretty well known fact it was pretty much a Roberts vendetta against the previous writers shortly after. Alas, there isn't much left of this era easily found online, so it's easy to see how it got completely lost to time. In hindsight it's less me caring they messed up the character and more the moment I realized - kind of ironically like a Lucas - the franchise succeeded in spite of him, at points, not because of him. Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 13:59
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. A producer in game design is a bit different from a producer in movies, they're closer to project managers. Darian Vorlick is a producer for CIG and unless I am seriously off about things he constantly works his rear end off. I know Travis Day did. After Chris formed Digital Anvil I think Erin started his own studio and developed Starlancer while Chris hosed around with the Wing Commander movie and Freelancer simultaneously. From my understanding Roberts were both "publisher side producers" with Roberts name being more honorary than anything. They weren't the development producers, because you're right, they are project managers. There's a couple listed for each game that aren't Chris Roberts. Notably I am basing this again off interviews with the various development teams, because there's always a question about what it was like to work with Chris Roberts, and they explained they only saw him once every few months because he was doing other things to get a "blessing," basically. I'm paraphrasing but this was an interview from like 1994-1998ish that pretty much confirmed it. It only stuck in my head all these years because it was a bit of a revelation back then about how things went behind the scenes. It also matches with Roberts own Wiki somewhat: quote:Wing Commander was published later in 1990 and was highly acclaimed. Wing Commander (and the franchise it spawned) soon became Origin's most successful product. Roberts wasn't as heavily involved in the sequel Wing Commander II, which he only produced. He instead concentrated on Strike Commander. First shown to the public at Summer CES 1991, the project suffered from numerous delays and was not released until 1993. He returned to Wing Commander soon after, devising the original concept for the spin-off Wing Commander: Privateer (which his brother, Erin Roberts, produced) and being more deeply involved in Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV. Privateer was not produced by Erin Roberts; that part's in error. He was an associate producer only and again, on the money side of things. Strike Commander (I had forgotten that part) was the game that pulled Chris Roberts away from WC during that era. His active involvement in WC IV was true, but what it doesn't mention is it was almost entirely with the cinematic direction, not the game design. Still, it was way more than he had with WC2, WC Privateer, WC Armada or WC Academy (which while a lovely rip-off of a game was immensely fun on my old black & white laptop). ED: In fact Erin Roberts involvement may have been why most of the key players behind Privateer jumped ship, the first of several times to leave Origin before it's downgrading into being EA's "Ultima Online support company." ED: Also the fact he was producing a ton of games while actually developing another leads me to believe I wasn't off about the honorary production credit. Too bad all my old WC stuff is packed in my parents attic on the wrong side of the country. Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 15:17
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Madcosby posted:What happened after the 7 days? 
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Jan 4, 2016 06:17
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WebDog posted:Of course what is curious is to how 600LY will fit into their game engine which at most supports only 16km x16km. That is actually the easiest thing. Simply make the distances between systems too great to ever realistically do it without a jump drive (not out of the question), and then make every single system it's own server shard. I would be utterly shocked if that's not what they're doing because it's the only thing that makes any sense. There is absolutely zero reason to try to make the universe a single "map."
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Jan 4, 2016 14:10
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I'll admit something: I've spent a lot of years theory crafting how to make the game I (and I think most of the people here) wanted, which is basically Privateer with the ability to walk around your ship and bases. That's frustrating is I've long held it's not as hard as it sounds. The trick, of course, is to use tricks. While in theory their nested-instancing system sounds like a good idea, it's clear they don't have it implemented and aren't close at all. Why? Because of things like clipping out of the ship: Nothing is instanced. What they described isn't impossible (effectively using FPS tricks as old as the Half-Life engine more) but it's very complicated. But yeah. Back to what I was saying. Simply put all you need to do is effectively render an FPS level, and then use "portals" to open cameras into the space game where the windows are: You do not actually make the interior of the ship fly through space, period. The actual interior is sitting in what you might describe as it's "own dimension" so to speak; it's just a matter then of placing the windows on the ship's space model to match up with the ones in the first person level. (For reference when I say portals in this context I effectively mean the same thing they used in the game Prey, many years ago, to render another part of the game onto a surface.) So from that point out, all you have to do is design a normal space game, except again - use old FPS tricks to immerse people. It's all smoke and mirrors. Instead of the trigger event in an FPS being walking into a room that causes things to begin exploding, you change the trigger event to "Starship critical hit." Instead of the red alert event being an NPC hitting a switch, it could be because the ship has entered a hostile proximity. This allows for all the dramatic effects promised by Star Citizen (walking down the corridor and suddenly the alerts go red and the panels explode) but reduce them, design wise, to something that literally every FPS has done. They don't need to be PERFECTLY dynamic; you can have a bunch of scripted events and pick them at random far easier, and it'll look just as good if you put in enough variation. Long story short, what I mean is you create a regular space game, and then you think of the space ship interiors as effectively a very fancy UI wrapper. Cryengine came with everything needed to do the first person parts of this, it'd just require making "levels" to act as ships and bases, while also creating an engaging space game. Is is flat out not loving worth it to insist that the XYZ position of everyone on the ship match precisely with where they are in space. This obviously also helps performance greatly; rendering a space game isn't that hard today, and neither is rendering interior rooms. The downside is - gasp - the need for more smoke and mirrors to do extra things like I mentioned. Things like EVA and boarding? Not only possible but practical using this method; simply walk into an airlock, CLOSE the airlock (the same trick many games have used for loading new levels) and then cut to a quick external shot if you floating into space. To the game, EVA you is just another ship. Yeah some things would be lost with this method (you could NOT look into the windows of a star ship and see the people inside as that would be a massive loving rendering waste), but it'd also actually work and, at the heart of it, accomplish everything that matters. Boarding a ship? Allow your team to breach the airlock by floating over to a terminal and doing a hack, then cycle them onto the ship map the same way you cycle people out of the ship: Pile in, close down, and move the players to the ship interior map. For Christ's sakes, handheld device games use this method all the time. Same with approaching a planet. Would anyone here be angry if you had a brief cutscene that shows your ship entering the planet, and then can disembark exactly how I described the EVA? Just enter the airlock, cycle, and then load a new pretty standard FPS map that is the base. Tada. Basically exactly what they did in the actually successful Privateer, just nextgen - instead of clicking around a base to do things you walk around it. That's all there is to it. The base, like everything else, doesn't need to exist in 100% accurate XYZ space with the system; merely approaching the planet lets you show up. Anyway, it's all pretty frustrating because in their quest to create PERFECT DETAIL they shot something that, honestly at it's core, isn't anywhere near impossible to make. If they had cut this obsessive need to not have any pre-scripted events (which don't always have to play out the same time; most games use physics explosions to, a, send a panel across a room and it's not always the same automatically) or for people to -actually- be tracked on board starships in space, and were willing to fake these things, they could have instead dedicated all their time on making these things immersive instead of making them work. The game I wanted I firmly believe could have been designed on the original $42 million dollars very, very easily. Again, basically just design a regular space game, except with that FPS level wrapper; instead of just hitting a button to jump into a gun turret, you walk to the gun turret. I'd kill for a chance to work on game going about this in that kind of practical way, but alas, I don't think anybody will touch the genre with a 200 foot pole after SC implodes except Elite Dangerous. ED: I should note that this method frees them up, again, to actually design -a game- instead of a technical mess. You want NPCs that have a fancy day/night sleeping/wake cycle and can't run their stations if they're not on their stations? Not a problem, just give the NPCs a routine inside of the level. Once they walk to, say, a gunnery console just give them a "busy working on the console" animation, and then for all intents and purposes, use absolutely normal space-game AI to operate the turret inside of the "space" part of the game. Effectively running a small mini-game over the top of a large game. They seriously could have cranked out stupid gadgets like the hot tub or drink dispenser ridiculously easy then because they wouldn't be spending every waking hour trying to hold together the technical mess with glue. It'd all been about as complicated (and important) as adding stupid Duke Nukem 3D like minigames to a regular FPS then. ED2: Oh this also corrects a lot of the issues with network stuff. You ONLY would need the FPS information from what is happening in your ship. They are trying to do with this with Instancing but it's a terrible idea that's a HUGE amount of work for little payoff. The portals into the "space realm" for lack of a better word only need to transmit back what is happening -in space-, not on other people's ships. Again they're trying to do that, but they're also trying to do it with this strange exact 1:1 positioning so your character is at the precise XYZ in all realms they should be. This reminds me a little of when American McGee first broke off of iD and bought a 3D engine and his artists kept trying to stuff million-polygon models into the rendering technology on par with Quake I, because they wanted 'perfect detail.' That project folded, badly. Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 14:34
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Rutibex posted:sounds like you are in luck, because the game you are after has already been made: That looks mighty advanced for the PS/1
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Jan 4, 2016 16:57
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Hammerite posted:okay yeah probably but you have spent far too much time on this dude, this is the thread for pointing and laughing at the funny people who think they will get to play amazing space game Yeah that got way into detail, my whole point was that if they weren't obsessed with all this PERFECT ACCURACY NOT FAKED universe they could have had this poo poo out the door last year pretty much feature-complete. I was just long winded as gently caress about it.
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Jan 5, 2016 01:49
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MeLKoR posted:Derek Smart is and always will be Derek Smart, it's like watching someone juggle bottles of nitroglycerin. However when he provoked CIG into giving him a refund he became instrumental in giving goons a way of getting hundreds of thousands of dollars out of this pit. In my book that gets him a lot of leniency, if not outright tolerating shitposting (which he isn't doing anyway) then simply by trying to prevent other goons from deliberately poking the bear and throwing him into a temper tantrum. I've literally never brought myself to dislike Derek Smart, even when it was cool to do so. He is consistently entertaining and has been for over a decade. It wouldn't surprise me if the "Derek Smart" we know is pretty much internet performance art.
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Jan 5, 2016 12:48
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I hope if they go under they are legally obligated to dump everything they've done on the game thus far to the backers. Some indie space game might make good use out of the ship models.
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Jan 9, 2016 17:14
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Speaking of Origin, Richard Garriot is the one who has poo poo really figured out. I heard his last kickstarter sucked, but look up that lawsuit he had over Tabula Rasa.. dude cleared something like $32 million to pay for more trips to space for doing next to nothing. Richard Garriot owns though, his insane maze-houses and theme parties are legendary. I was still laughing when I went to a Gamestop last year and saw they had a dozen copies of Tabula Rasa still being sold for full price despite the fact the servers have been dead for years. Fried Watermelon posted:I am the best saleswoman in the world according to myself, the best saleswoman in the world. Since she was a small child, too. She popped out of the womb and immediately negotiated a discount on her mom's medical bill Blazing Ownager fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Jan 9, 2016 |
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Jan 9, 2016 17:17
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