Risc1911 posted:

You really need to let this sink in. You unlock the ability to spend more money... /smh

RattiRatto posted:

Not many things make me laugh as this thread, and it always delivers
God the thing of the twitter incident made me truly fall down my chair.
Thanks for being here uncle Derek

I'm also quite amused by all the redditors that see and read this thread as a global effort to destabilize whatever dream they have now.
Reading this place without grasping the overall hilarity and sense of humor which comes out every post must be... well something like reddit i guess

quote:

Greetings Citizens,

As you know, I like to use this space to highlight crowd funding efforts that I feel are deserving of your attention. Today, I’d like to point you to a project called Star Traders, currently in the midst of its Kickstarter campaign. Another space game? Yes. And like a lot of the games I love, it’s set in a distant future filled with starships, intergalactic trading and epic heroes. Unlike other projects I’ve written about, though, Star Trades doesn’t’ need an overclocked CPU or the hottest graphics card… because it’s a board game!

Star Traders follows the grand tradition of games like Risk and Solarquest by aiming straight at the heart of good game design: it’s simple to play but frustratingly difficult to master. The game is designed to function at a number of different levels, with the end result being a range of game types that will appeal to every skill level. With the most basic rule set, Star Trader can be enjoyed in an hour by all ages, while using the most complex options can make for the kind of legendary all-night game sessions that define the hobby.

Many of you already know the Star Citizen connection: the game’s creators, David Ladyman and Ryan Archer, have done master-class work in helping create our ‘Verse these past three years. David has been responsible for putting together our brochures, manuals and magazine, and Ryan is the artist behind many of our blueprint images and a lot of what appears in Jump Point (his UEE squadron patches are a particular favorite of mine.) I’ve also had the privilege of working with David on almost every title I did at Origin and on the Wing Commander film (he put together a technical manual published alongside the movie.) You can read more about David and his extensive history making games here.

I mention that connection because I believe it’s a key element of crowd funding: supporting good people. I can tell you from many years of experience that David (and Ryan) will go above and beyond to make their dream a reality, and that they’re true artists: interested in creating something new that others will enjoy. They’ve also scattered some Star Citizen Easter eggs in the game itself… and even asked Sandi and I to appear as characters. Good people, good game design and a desire to make something great. What better combination could there be? I’m eager to get my own copy and I encourage you to check out their video below, visit their project page and consider pledging if you enjoy great board games!

— Chris Roberts

P.S. – Don’t worry, David and Ryan aren’t going anywhere! Their work on Star Citizen happens on a contract basis, and so they’ll continue delivering Jump Point and all the art you’ve come to know. We don’t have any stake in Star Traders, but I know that it’s always best to let creative people pursue their dreams!

Beet Wagon posted:

Speaking of, I had an interesting interaction with a redditor named doxxed_by_derek yesterday. He would reply to some dumb thing I said with an argument, and then five minutes after each post would edit his post to be nonsenical clips of text, AND THEN like an hour later went back and edited all his posts to just be links to the same post, and then finally went through and deleted everything. Maybe even his account.

I wish I had screencapped it, it was amazing.

Sundowner posted:

just curious but what's the extent of your game dev/coding ability? i ask mostly because i'm actually interested in it because i want to create my Best Great Space Sim Game but i don't know a lick of coding yet.

A Neurotic Jew posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15246-Note-From-The-Chairman

A Neurotic Jew posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15246-Note-From-The-Chairman

A Neurotic Jew posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15246-Note-From-The-Chairman

Risc1911 posted:

The most hilarious part is that it's not a complete package at all and you get the privilege to spend more on a Javelin that you "unlock" by buying this package:


You really need to let this sink in. You unlock the ability to spend more money... /smh

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

You know I still don't quite understand why they gave Sandi the callsign 'Pusher.' Does her character sling space meth to the other pilots so they can stay alert on long patrols? Or is it actually just a joke that she's VP of marketing and sells Jpegs to addicts?

Dandywalken posted:

See ya in the 'verse

Toops posted:

I started properly "game dev" coding about a year ago, but I've been a programmer for over a decade. I did work for Sierra doing grunt work back in the late 90's/early 2000's but I didn't learn that much, I was really green. There are particular, ehm, NUANCES to programming for games, but if you have coding experience it's really no different.

I will now share my detailed thoughts, apologies if it's overly geeky.

Game programming tends to be centered around your main "update" loop. At a basic level, if you're running at 60 frames per second, every 1/60th a second the game accepts input and decides how to act on it. For example, the FlightController in SP checks whether the user moved their mouse, and if so, sends the mouse movement to the CalculateRotation method where that mouse movement is translated to flight rotation. Then that rotation is delegated to the ApplyTorque method which, as you can guess, applies torque to the ship's "Rigidbody" physics object.

So this example highlights what I consider the biggest challenge of game development: If you're not careful, game logic will wind up tightly coupled to static objects (ships, asteroids, FPS animation rigs, etc). This is bad because objects tend to change a lot, and there are lots of them. "Objects" in this case are typically made by artists, and they're constantly being updated, modified, refined, etc. The hard part of game programming is writing logic that's agnostic to the object(s) it acts on. This allows your artists and level designers to rapidly iterate without you constantly having to change the logic in kind. The bigger your team, the harder this is to maintain. Great communication in big teams is a necessity.

Along these lines, I've found the need to constantly refactor my code. In Unity, they (unfortunately) teach you to directly reference game objects using the editor "drag and drop" model. Basically instead of the code "finding" the object it wants, they tell you to literally drag the object into the script's variable "field." While this is really fast and seemingly convenient, you can wind up with spaghetti code. Change a variable name and forget to re-drag the object to the variable field, and you get null pointers all over.

I decided in a previous game (that I never finished) to use a message bus whenever possible. This allows objects to "subscribe" to the types of messages it cares about, and other objects can "produce" those message types. Basically, instead of the FlightController sending debug info directly to the debug "UI" object, and anyone else who needs it, the FC just plops "DebugInfo" messages on the message bus, and since the UI controller subscribes to it, it just updates the debug info indirectly. This de-couples the FC and DebugInfo UI, and allows me to change things in one place instead of all N places that read debug info.

So you have to have good design rules, and build a flexible architecture, just like with any program. This is my main criticism of CIG.. I can tell they have tightly-coupled code/config/objects, and this (imo) is why they take so long to do anything, why there's no game emerging, and why they're pretty deeply hosed.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Does her character sling space meth to the other pilots so they can stay alert on long patrols? Or is it actually just a joke that she's VP of marketing and sells Jpegs to addicts?

Ravane posted:

What's the difference between C++ and C#? I only need Python for using an electron microscope or really any other equipment.

Ravane posted:

At least it works and is great for phone VR (of which there is not much). But it does it's job and doesn't require the user to pay more than 5 bucks. The same can't be said for star citizen.


I hear ya, Java sucks. Python is incredible, the language is hella easy to understand but has enough complexity to it and enough libraries that it's incredibly useful. I prefer doing statistical analysis in it over Matlab and R simply because of the simple interface. On the other hand, it's processing speed can be really slow for anything science-y that takes a while (iteration, etc).

Alternatively, there's Julia which I've started learning that has C++ level of processing speed and is great for statistical analysis. Though the libraries are low, so you'd need to be able to create your own libraries sometimes.

Daztek posted:

Mirificus posted:

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/6460233/#Comment_6460233

Dante80 posted:

It's actually building the economic history, you numb-scull!

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/6468658/#Comment_6468658

Madcosby posted:

This is a goon or something, right?

holy poo poo

the government needs to step in. Protect these people from themselves. Chris reads poo poo like this on a daily basis and just loving scams these people