grimcreaper posted:

All the goons who have accounts should make a serious effort post on the SC forums and recommend an RTS mode in the Homeworld 2 style where a commander could give orders to all the player ships on his side. push REALLY hard with some serious posting and see if we can catch Croberts attention and make him promise MORE vaporware.

Chalks posted:

Yeah, don't lie to yourself this game has been in production for less than two years. Pay no attention to the fact that no game has ever measured production in this way.

CrazyLoon posted:

...and she wears it outside of said audition because...?

Bootcha posted:

It would be charitable to say out of the 37 months this company has been formed since the 10/10/12 start, 20 have been spent on the product moving forward. The rest of the time it's 1-step-forward-2-steps-back due to new tech adoptions, new design standards, and countless art redesigns.


It's either a henna-style tat, or she has been told under no uncertain terms that if that tat washes off she'll be replaced (because she's a non-speaking extra).

Speaking of Sandi, another deep thought...

So during during my own investigation as to what was up at CIG, I wondered "Why did no one file complaints against CIG for verbal abuse/bigotry/etc?"

Sandi, as she has said, wears many hats. One of those hats is HR.

If you have a problem with an employee, you go to your immediate supervisor, obviously. They go to HR to file this complaint.
If you have a problem with Sandi, you go to your immediate supervisor, and they go to Sandi to fil-holy poo poo no I am not picking this fight.
If you have a problem with Sandi, and you work in CS/PR/CM, you go to your immediate supervisor OH HELLO SANDI NOTHING I WAS JUST USING THE BATHROOM!

Alternatively, if you have a problem with the HR department, you go to the boss that hired them and file a complaint.
Alternatively, if you have a problem with Sandi, you go to her husband Chris Roberts that h-gently caress this I am not putting my rear end on the line for this.
Alternatively, if you have a problem with Sandi, and you work in CS/PR/CM, you go talk to her huband Chris Ro-WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU DOING UP HERE GO BACK TO THE PIT!

It is, in this situation, where you must face both Sandi and her husband for both the primary points of contact for a HR complaint, I would assume that many employees would say "gently caress this poo poo".

But why not sue? Certainly there are industry lawyers that understand workplace compliance law and would lay it down?

It turns out, and Derek can probably back me up on this, is two-fold:
1) Many industry employees are not affluent enough to financially afford a long legal battle with their employer. Any time spent in court is time spent not making rent.
2) Many industry employees do not know their workplace compliance rights, and while there have been strides to nullify this, there are still some laws that place the onus of responsibility on the employee.

The industry is a small one, and rocking the boat sometimes gets you unofficially black-listed for a spell (to cool off). As such, employees with opt to say "gently caress it", and either endure abuse in the hopes of shipping the product, or find a new job now to quietly GTFO of the current bad workplace.

The accusations are in The Escapist article. Anonymous. Some of those are known to me.

I think the sad part is that Smart's class action lawsuit will ever so briefly touch upon these accusations merely as a point to render upon the defendant's "character" and move on.

Eonwe posted:

I had a steak today

It was a life changing experience

I played a game today
It was a life changing experience

Loiosh posted:

Already promised. That's actually when I made my first pledge for Star Citizen. It's the $13,000,000 goal: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

Command and Control Center – Supervise the battle from the deck of your Idris or Destroyer (class TBA) with advanced C&C packages that allow you to tie all of your ships together and assume central command from the 3rd seat.

grimcreaper posted:

Huh.. im not sure how i missed that. But its still based on your own ships only, not commanding all the players in the vicinity in the Natural Selection commander style. I want the Homeworld 2 RTS except using players instead of your own ships like Natural Selection commander mode.

quote:

On a serious note, since SC is supposed to be about *realism* in many ways: Croberts needs to actually go in and talk to some serious military delevopment tech firms and see that EVERYTHING hes doing with his ships AND fps side of stuff is not just wrong, but absolutely wrong. Were talking roughly 1000 years in the future (i could be wrong its been a while since i cared enough to look it up) and we already have tech IN THE MAKING that makes stuff in SC look antiquated.

Variable 5 posted:

This post changed my life.

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

Hey gently caress you dude. Now I got aware of my breathing and have to breathe consciously until I forget about it again.

EightAce posted:

Yes I was not of sound mind at the time of writing and if I expand anymore I will get at least two people in a lot of trouble .

grimcreaper posted:

Huh.. im not sure how i missed that. But its still based on your own ships only, not commanding all the players in the vicinity in the Natural Selection commander style. I want the Homeworld 2 RTS except using players instead of your own ships like Natural Selection commander mode.

Loiosh posted:

It'll be supposedly very much like Natural Selection where you'll have your own ship drones/resources and still be able to issue waypoints and orders to players. But who knows, that just is -just- starting development now.


That choice is intentional. If it was following a more realistic design we end up with what Enemy Starfighter is doing, where all the fighters are basically drones that are AI controlled, but pilots can control any ship and ASSUMING MANUAL CONTROL. The design of SC it to kinda be like WW II dogfighting.. in sppacceee. How well they hit that goal is anyone's guess. So far, I've been having mild fun with 2.0, but I know there's so much more work to be done.

MeLKoR posted:

What does this mean, how can you fly more than one ship into combat?

MeLKoR posted:

What does this mean, how can you fly more than one ship into combat?

MeLKoR posted:

What does this mean, how can you fly more than one ship into combat?

Dusty Lens posted:

Bootcha posted:

It would be charitable to say out of the 37 months this company has been formed since the 10/10/12 start, 20 have been spent on the product moving forward. The rest of the time it's 1-step-forward-2-steps-back due to new tech adoptions, new design standards, and countless art redesigns.


It's either a henna-style tat, or she has been told under no uncertain terms that if that tat washes off she'll be replaced (because she's a non-speaking extra).

Speaking of Sandi, another deep thought...

So during during my own investigation as to what was up at CIG, I wondered "Why did no one file complaints against CIG for verbal abuse/bigotry/etc?"

Sandi, as she has said, wears many hats. One of those hats is HR.

If you have a problem with an employee, you go to your immediate supervisor, obviously. They go to HR to file this complaint.
If you have a problem with Sandi, you go to your immediate supervisor, and they go to Sandi to fil-holy poo poo no I am not picking this fight.
If you have a problem with Sandi, and you work in CS/PR/CM, you go to your immediate supervisor OH HELLO SANDI NOTHING I WAS JUST USING THE BATHROOM!

Alternatively, if you have a problem with the HR department, you go to the boss that hired them and file a complaint.
Alternatively, if you have a problem with Sandi, you go to her husband Chris Roberts that h-gently caress this I am not putting my rear end on the line for this.
Alternatively, if you have a problem with Sandi, and you work in CS/PR/CM, you go talk to her huband Chris Ro-WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU DOING UP HERE GO BACK TO THE PIT!

It is, in this situation, where you must face both Sandi and her husband for both the primary points of contact for a HR complaint, I would assume that many employees would say "gently caress this poo poo".

But why not sue? Certainly there are industry lawyers that understand workplace compliance law and would lay it down?

It turns out, and Derek can probably back me up on this, is two-fold:
1) Many industry employees are not affluent enough to financially afford a long legal battle with their employer. Any time spent in court is time spent not making rent.
2) Many industry employees do not know their workplace compliance rights, and while there have been strides to nullify this, there are still some laws that place the onus of responsibility on the employee.

The industry is a small one, and rocking the boat sometimes gets you unofficially black-listed for a spell (to cool off). As such, employees with opt to say "gently caress it", and either endure abuse in the hopes of shipping the product, or find a new job now to quietly GTFO of the current bad workplace.

The accusations are in The Escapist article. Anonymous. Some of those are known to me.

I think the sad part is that Smart's class action lawsuit will ever so briefly touch upon these accusations merely as a point to render upon the defendant's "character" and move on.

xanif posted:

Also you can see your nose.

Eonwe posted:

I had a steak today

It was a life changing experience

I played a game today
It was a life changing experience

quote:

Here’s the deal. We’re doing crowdfunding on Kickstarter and on our own website (over here)

The great news is that we’ve already raised enough money to ensure this project will happen! But we don’t want to stop there. We have a lot more we want to add to Star Citizen and we need your help to do it!

The money raised on our site and here on Kicktstarter are combined to determine which of the main stretch goals* we’ve met, but Kickstarter has its own unique set of stretch goals! These will be ADDITIONAL to the main ones.

* That original stretch goal link on KS page is dead. So I grabbed an archived (10-27-12) copy for context

...

We have investors that have agreed to contribute the balance we need to complete this game as long as we can validate that there is a demand for a high end PC space game. By meeting or surpassing our target on Kickstarter you tell the world that you want a PC based Space Sim and allow us to make this game.

...

The people who pledge for their spaceships will get to test-fly them long before the general public. 12 months in, we will allow the early backers to play the multiplayer space combat Alpha, and then 20-22 months in they will get to play the Star Citizen Beta, adventuring around the huge open galaxy, well before the general public. We are going to limit our alpha slots to 200,000 as we want to stress test the game with real users, but will not be ready for the full load until we have finished Beta.

...

We are aiming for a AAA game experience. But depending on the funding levels reached, we may have to limit the experience for the initially released game version. Nonetheless, Chris Roberts and his teams have shown consistently that they are able to develop epic story-based games. Even with our very limited self-funding we have been able to do already a lot of work which is why we can show you not just concept art and a cinematic trailer, but an extensive demo of actual game play. So, we are confident that even with limited means we will be able to deliver an amazing experience.

...

The purpose of the higher stretch goals is to ensure that the game-as-described is finished in the two year time period. We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences.

quote:

OP - I think that you misunderstood what Eric was saying.

I will never build a game that I don't have full creative control. Its one of the reasons I haven't built another Wing Commander despite overtures over the years from EA to come back.

Having said that Star Citizen has always had financial investors as the estimated budget for Star Citizen was bigger than I thought was possible through crowd funding. We were clear about this from the start. If we didn't have this I don't think anyone would have believed we could build the game we're building.

The great thing with the success of the crowd funding is that we now actually need a lot less of this money, which means that the investors will have a much smaller share of the company and thus less say in the long term business decisions of the company (which are different than the creative decisions made building Star Citizen). There was a fairly lengthy interview I did in GamesBeat that goes into detail on way this is a good thing and why the more we raise during development from the crowd why it will be better for the community and the long term direction of the game. You can read the interview here -

http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/12/with-7-7m-raised-via-crowdfunding-chris-roberts-makes-his-sci-fi-game-in-the-public-eye-interview/

My dream is to make Star Citizen a 100% community funded game, with the investor money being only for contingency. I'm not counting on this but if we can do this is will be saying something about the power of the crowd as Star Citizen is not your normal crowd funded game - its something that will compete with the biggest AAA games out there.

I hope this makes you feel better!

-Chris

...

The beauty of digital is you don’t have those cost-of-goods issues. Nobody’s asking you to manufacture four million discs at $10 dollars a pop up front. You can scale with it. When we finish Star Citizen, we’ll be an expensive game. We won’t be as expensive as a big triple-A console game, but we’ll have about as much value and assets in it. We don’t have the same issues of manufacturing a bunch of physical goods and getting them into the channel. We’re capturing a much larger percentage of the final price. That’s a big issue, if I’m selling a $60-dollar game and only putting $35 dollars in my pocket. In our case, we can sell a $60-dollar game and just give three or four percent to the payment provider. It’s an opportunity for someone like me. I can be in the business without selling four million copies and still do very well.

quote:

We are pleased to announce the next set of stretch goals for Star Citizen. When we started to build Star Citizen, the goal was to raise $2 million to prove to investors that there was a market for space sims. What we’ve realized since then is that YOU are responsible for this game and not investors. So we’re going all the way: crowd funding will raise the $21 million needed to produce a AAA space sim. These are the next stretch goals that will take us there—more will be revealed as they are achieved!

quote:

The game on the low side was going to be about 14 million dollars to make and the high side, which is where we are at now, is going to be about 20 million.

quote:

April 30, 2013: “the game on the low side was going to be about 14 million dollars to make and the high side, which is where we are at now, is going to be about 20 million”

https://youtu.be/6vzlda0-XoY?t=490

May 17, 2013: “I mean it’s going to cost 20 million dollars plus by the time it’s all finished”

https://youtu.be/hYFCfRK4e6Y?t=20m12s

May 17, 2013: “then we’ll go live after the beta which I would anticipate would be sometime in early 2015. But essentially from the end of 2014 you should be able to play the full game but it will just be beta because there will still be things to tweak and balance.”

https://youtu.be/hYFCfRK4e6Y?t=24m30s

May 20, 2013: "Erik Kain @ 19:38: To round things out, you have about 9.5 million dollars in crowdfunding, new offices, what’s the road map from here? Where do you go for the rest of 2013? Where will you be next year?

Chris: So one of things we’re doing that I think is different from every other crowdfunded game that I’ve seen out there – although I could be corrected – is that we’re approaching the development process in terms of what our backers get differently. We’re sort of approaching it, because Star Citizen is pretty big and pretty ambitious game – I mean it’s going to cost 20 million dollars plus by the time its all finished. What we’re doing is essentially taking components of functionality in the game and we’ll be splitting them out and letting the community – the backers – interact, use them, play with them before the final game is all brought together."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/05/20/star-citizen-an-interview-with-chris-roberts-on-his-ambitious-space-simulation-game/

August 18, 2015: “When we first started, we raised $6 million with crowdfunding,” Roberts told me. “That was a lot, but it still wasn’t what we were gonna make the game for because we had private investors lined up. At that point, we were thinking of making a much more contained game.”

http://kotaku.com/why-star-citizen-is-taking-so-long-1724835913

Octopode posted:

Well, they never planned to make a game for $2M. The initial budget was ~$20M.

Octopode posted:

You don't even have the basic facts of the initial funding campaign correct. The goal was specifically to raise $2M to $4M, and was explicitly stated from the day the funding campaign went live on the game's website to be in order to secure the remainder of funding from outside investors. You can easily verify this using archive.org.

There's also several older interviews and articles that coroborrate a ~$20M initial target budget, like https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13103-New-Stretch-Goals which was ported over from their old site, or this RPS interview after $8M in funding, which states they're still going with VC investors, even well above the amount you claim was their initial budget target: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/20/chris-roberts-on-life-after-crowdfunding-games-vs-film/

There's literally nothing to support your claim of a $2M target budget.

Octopode posted:

They needed 10% of the total budget raised through both Kickstarter and their website combined as front money to secure the rest of the original investor budget. The actual Kickstarter goal was only $500k, with the rest planned to come from the original funding campaign on their website.

Octopode posted:

Yes. It's right there in the original Kickstarter description, even:

"We have investors that have agreed to contribute the balance we need to complete this game as long as we can validate that there is a demand for a high end PC space game. By meeting or surpassing our target on Kickstarter you tell the world that you want a PC based Space Sim and allow us to make this game."