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AP
Jul 12, 2004

One Ring to fool them all
One Ring to find them
One Ring to milk them all
and pockets fully line them
Grimey Drawer
People rightly make a lot of how this whole thing is a scam and that's bad and all.

But occasionally I like to remind myself that these people are idiots and I just laugh.

https://twitter.com/StarCitizenCAN/status/934860750950162432

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Colostomy Bag
Jan 11, 2016

:lesnick: C-Bangin' it :lesnick:

Combat Theory posted:



I actually have one of these.... The cigarette donkey, not the horse mask

Sadly, I do too.

his nibs
Feb 27, 2016

:kayak:Welcome to the:kayak:
Dream Factory
:kayak:
Grimey Drawer
Moon

https://clips.twitch.tv/SecretiveViscousOstrichVoHiYo

Thoatse
Feb 29, 2016

Lol said the scorpion, lmao

Virtual Captain
Feb 20, 2017

Archive Priest of the Stimperial Order

Star Citizen Good, in all things forevermore. Amen.
:pray:

jester86 posted:

So we will be making the sub read only after 3.0 drops.

Closes the subreddit, 3.0 appears a week later. :tinfoil:

Thoatse
Feb 29, 2016

Lol said the scorpion, lmao

Combat Theory posted:



I actually have one of these.... The cigarette donkey, not the horse mask


Do cigarettes from it taste like rear end?

shrach
Jan 10, 2004

daylight ssssaving time

Incitatus posted:

The cost of The Imaginarium, when you add it the cost of the actors and the editing of what was shot there adds up. The cost of renting the studio is just another added cost for material that isn't currently being used/released.

Yeah, but we know they sought lawyers and negotiated to ensure the shoot was covered by the tax credits. We know it took place in 2015. We know there is an abnormal bump in the cost of sales in 2015. We "know" that actors like Mark Strong commanded a salary of around 200k for a full movie that year. £3.5m is a lot of money to cover Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, and Gillian Anderson then a bunch of other acting talent. Especially if anyone was on a performance bonus that not means their footage can't even be used without renegotiating.

Any other costs for making the footage usable will be in the costs already covered by Foundry 42 presumably, since they have nothing else to show for the entire amount of money spent in the UK.

Think about it, the UK is this blackhole where ~$70m of backer money and ~$10m of tax credits have vanished and so far there is basically nothing to show for it. You could argue all that maybe $80m has gone on motion capture. You could argue that most of that $80m has gone on fixing what has come out of the Texas studio. No one really knows what the gently caress has actually been produced by the UK studio and apparently that is fine because of "spoilers" and this one is the "well run" company by the "focused" brother.

SpaceCurtisLeMay
Sep 30, 2016

We're at war with Goons. We were attacked by Goons. Do you want to kill Goons, or would you rather have Citizens killed?
$3M a month number that multiple people in the community arrived at a few years ago was derived by different methods. Beer took a look at Frontier, roughly similar sized company at the time, and used their cost basis. Which was reasonable. I looked at the estimated costs per studio in salary, class A office space, estimated taxes, utilities, benefits, and other expenses. And I was using the most conservative numbers I could including assuming CIG's pay was in the bottom 25% of the industry. Thing is we used different methods and all arrived in the same ballpark figure. And those figures did not take into account one time expenses such as shooting Squadron 42 with MoCap & actors. Adding in $20M - $30M is probably reasonable.

Meanwhile I spent the last of my refund money last week. SIG had 30 round AR mags on sale for $4.99ea and free shipping on orders over $100. So I bought 21. Also bought a 4 pack of stripped lowers for $130 including FFL transfer.

Incitatus
Dec 16, 2005

The Meat Man was out of wings, Mr. William Ash More!:argh:
CIG has the most transparent development of a video game ever! So long as you don't ask anything about the financials.

Daztek
Jun 2, 2006



Well, that didn't last long, CIG released a patch and FTR is firmly back in the Star Citizen camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Xh4zTCa-8

TheAgent
Feb 16, 2002

The call is coming from inside Dr. House
Grimey Drawer

Daztek posted:

Well, that didn't last long, CIG released a patch and FTR is firmly back in the Star Citizen camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Xh4zTCa-8
that's going to make people lose their minds

well played

fuctifino
Jun 11, 2001

Daztek posted:

Well, that didn't last long, CIG released a patch and FTR is firmly back in the Star Citizen camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Xh4zTCa-8

This is genuinely hilarious. FTR, you should focus on more things like this rather than slap-fighting with Derek.

FailureToReport
Nov 25, 2017

Warlord in training

fuctifino posted:

This is genuinely hilarious. FTR, you should focus on more things like this rather than slap-fighting with Derek.

I'm over it, that whole thing has bugged me since he started in screaming about his privacy, I proved my point, moving on with my life, got video games to play.

Beet Wagon
Oct 19, 2015





game is good, actually

his nibs
Feb 27, 2016

:kayak:Welcome to the:kayak:
Dream Factory
:kayak:
Grimey Drawer

Daztek posted:

Well, that didn't last long, CIG released a patch and FTR is firmly back in the Star Citizen camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Xh4zTCa-8

pro click :golfclap:

FailureToReport
Nov 25, 2017

Warlord in training

Beet Wagon posted:

game is good, actually



Of loving course, my buddy dies EVAing 3 ft down to the Olisar pad but this is happens somehow?

I was kind of bummed, the first night I got on a Nox and it shot me up into atmosphere and I wanted to try to dismount and see if I could freefall back to the Nox. My game just crashed as soon as I clicked exit though. :(

Virtual Captain
Feb 20, 2017

Archive Priest of the Stimperial Order

Star Citizen Good, in all things forevermore. Amen.
:pray:
My 3.0 Life
There is a feeling that I'm desyncing
on a fresh server still I'm glitching
sinking now and so uneasy
Delamar hangs stitched and worn

I've waited for a long, long time
for the patch to move silence my fears
it feels bad now
I feel the posts come and move me to the other side
Yes I do, yes I do

Patch be still and know that everything's all right
Patch be sure and go with mobiglass in stride
Patch be still and know, be very, very wise
Patch be sure and go when you know the sale is nigh

Now there is a ladder, Lord, and I just can't let go
I have faith in him, Lord, I have faith
and I've pledged more than I can let go
I have drifted for as long as I can
Yes I have, yes I have

Patch be still and know that everytin'g all right
Patch be sure and go with mobiglass in stride
Patch be still and know, don't ever get uptight
Patch be sure and go when you know the sale is nigh

[airhorn solo]

Patch everyting to be all right
Go with mobiglass in stride
Know, be very, very wise
and go when the sale is nigh

[To the tune of My Impersonal Life (1971)]

Mangoose
Dec 11, 2007

Come out with your pants down!
I've managed to enter an internet slapfight with a wayward soul and I just called bullshit on the netcode and server meshing and whatnot and now I'm asked to loving DEFEND it of all things and I'm a bit out of my depth on all the details. Can someone give me a short rundown on why it's dumb and won't work? Cryengine can't do it, right?

Ah, gently caress it... *stares into mirror*

Derek Smart, Derek Smart, Derek Smart

MilesK
Nov 5, 2015

"There won't be any persistent universe, there won't be any single-player story, but it's really for us to balance combat, the weapons, and the ships. We'll test the back-end server infrastructure for how many people we can get in one area, the tolerance on latency and all that stuff. You'll be able to customize your ship, put weapons on it. By that point we've got opportunities to bring new people in, which generates more revenue. Even the current people will probably want to create a ship, create a weapon, and that will generate more revenue."

This non-traditional schedule is based on looking at what the players would like to get, and that's something Roberts is passionate about. "The thing I find really fascinating is that my mindset's completely changed," Roberts explained. "I have this community that's been incredible. They've backed me way more than I thought they were going to back me, and we still get new people every month. We generated $800,000 in February alone, which is crazy. We don't even have a campaign going, we're not even selling new ships or anything, and we don't have a game."

Roberts believes this process will result in a better game on a shorter time frame. "The typical way, even on an MMO, was 'OK, we're going to work on this MMO for four years, now we're going to do a closed beta' and you've got all these systems that come online and all these problems that start to sprout up. It's almost overwhelming," Roberts said. "When you have shorter development times it focuses you. Normally you're not that focused in the beginning until you get to the last year and then you're running around like a madman. Part of the idea is to break down the overall project, and fortunately it has a lot of discrete aspects - dogfighting in space can be fairly discrete - so you break it up and then say we'll release this on this day and the team has to focus on that."

The engagement with the community has already improved the game. "We've gotten feedback from our community that's made it a better game, even at this early stage," Roberts noted. "Surveys where you get tens of thousands of people give you a much better idea of what people want. We polled quite a few times what people wanted to be doing, and explorer was the number one choice, which I did not think would be the case. I thought it would be mercenary, or fighting, or trading. What happens with that is we focus more resources on exploration; it's what 60, 70 percent of people want to do. That sort of thing is really useful early in the process; if you make the wrong guess you could waste man-months."

This process has another important difference with the classic development process. "Unlike with a publisher, you can't pull the wool over their eyes because it's the real people who are going to be playing it," Roberts noted. "If you're a publisher you can visit me and I can show you the milestone, but you have no idea if behind the scenes I've got it jury-rigged or whatever. Whereas with the real community, there's no way."

-Croberts, April 2013

G0RF
Mar 19, 2015

Some galactic defender you are, Space Cadet.

Daztek posted:

Well, that didn't last long, CIG released a patch and FTR is firmly back in the Star Citizen camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Xh4zTCa-8

Oh Lord I was listening to this while doing something else and groaning and muttering under my breath “what an Asskiss this guy is now!”

Then when the praise got too effusive I looked at my phone and BOOM - totally rekt!

:gary:

Mangoose
Dec 11, 2007

Come out with your pants down!

Beet Wagon posted:

game is good, actually



Meanwhile you can't open a door or walk down a set of stairs without a 50% chance of getting annihilated

Kylra
Dec 1, 2006

Not a cute boy, just a boring girl.
I think someone just stole my ship.

Also I'm tabbed out because it takes like 6 minute with afterburner to reach the closest thing on the desert moon deal.

Fake edit: The game crashed when I was 20km away. I've lost like 10 ships and I still haven't seen a landmark yet.

Daztek posted:

Well, that didn't last long, CIG released a patch and FTR is firmly back in the Star Citizen camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Xh4zTCa-8
Amazing.

thatguy
Feb 5, 2003
Please don't use double ellipsis in every post it triggers me greatly.

FailureToReport
Nov 25, 2017

Warlord in training

G0RF posted:

Oh Lord I was listening to this while doing something else and groaning and muttering under my breath “what an Asskiss this guy is now!”

Then when the praise got too effusive I looked at my phone and BOOM - totally rekt!

:gary:

drat, around what part did it give it away since you listened to it audio only, I'd genuinely like to know.

Virtual Captain
Feb 20, 2017

Archive Priest of the Stimperial Order

Star Citizen Good, in all things forevermore. Amen.
:pray:

Mangoose posted:

I've managed to enter an internet slapfight with a wayward soul and I just called bullshit on the netcode and server meshing and whatnot and now I'm asked to loving DEFEND it of all things and I'm a bit out of my depth on all the details. Can someone give me a short rundown on why it's dumb and won't work? Cryengine can't do it, right?

Here I'll help:

a cyberpunk goose posted:

Unpacking why SC is doomed from a technical perspective is conveniently (for chris roberts) very tough because it's extremely hard to get people's attentions long enough to elaborate on why making games is hard and you can't just ideas-guy development teams into doing the impossible. let's try to break Star Citizen down by starting from the abstract:

game engines are, at their core, real time operating systems (RTOS)

you have disparate systems that need to be scheduled, informed of things like user input or network activity, share state + somehow send messages to each other (or, more dangerously, directly reference each other), be maintained to respect logical contracts etc. there's not a lot of shortcuts you can take between these systems without introducing serious consequences to your runtime stability or overall code maintainability, you need to design it Right™ and early and not let it slip when other people start helping you maintain/grow the engine.

the above outlines the overall concepts an "engine developer" has to maintain and grapple with. this is explicitly distinct from a "game developer" which I'll outline next.

engine development is all very complicated and often way more brittle than you expect. How many "complete" racing games have you seen on the Source engine compared to FPS games? The answer is obvious and influenced strongly by the products the original engine developers were aiming for. Some engines, like Unity, have done a great job at not being married to any one framework of gameplay but that ultimately results in a larger conceptual gap that a "game developer" might need to fill if they aren't an experienced "engine" developer or aren't good at building their own operating frameworks for the kind of game they want to make. In something like Unity there's no built in concept of guns or inventory or reticles or chat systems or existing game-like behavior. unity bridges this gap a bit with an asset store but then you are banging differently shaped puzzle pieces made by strangers together that might not fit nicely

The following are questions you need to answer and grasp the implications of when making any game and picking an engine that will suit your development style: first person? racing? strategy? turn based? multiplayer? single player? local multiplayer? physics a part of the gameplay or just aesthetic? persistent centralized accounts (ie: an MMO or something like it)? ad hoc p2p player servers? the list goes on, but you need answers to every question you can think of that is a core component of your game.

The answers to these questions will influence what kinds of problems you're signing yourself up to solve. If I know I'm making a 20 player arena based FPS shooter, I might as well go with UDK because out of the box it has templates and a lot of community discussion surrounding making FPS games and it has a history of being for that, the engine will present low friction for this problem set. If I try to make an FPS game in game maker or from scratch in C++, I'm going to be miserable and have to basically reinvent every single wheel.

Every system your game needs, that your engine may or may not make easy on you, needs to interact well with its dependent systems & providers at run-time and also be maintainable and ideally compartmentalized, you don't want to realize half way through development that upgrading your engine to the latest upstream (which comes with features you've been begging for) will break literally everything because you were coding around undocumented potentially-is-actually-a-bug behavior in the engine because you didn't really grok the intent outlined in the documentation and naively code-bashed your way into a solution. developers in all software need to develop a 6th sense for what "smells bad" when trying to make a framework do something it wasn't meant for, leading you to overarchitect some things in some cases, but also make extreme but convenient and well-weighed short-cuts in others. this specific skill along with the ability to set expectations reasonably ( :siren: ) is at the crux of being a good software developer.

Realistically it is impossible to design perfect game systems in a vacuum that you can plug and play together with any sort of configuration, there's always a compromise or some sort of edge case you're introducing with other systems and you end up having to write a bunch of special edge case marshalling to do things like: translate between one spacial system to another, or have one set of physics objects follow one set of rules while another set of physics objects follows another. and the way you implement these systems will concrete you into behavior that will exclude other potentialities for designs in the game.

Now let's talk about Crytek and Cryengine. Cryengine specifically set out to solve one very specific set of problems in game development: rendering huge amounts of space & geography efficiently and having such large space also work sanely in multiplayer. This made it naturally suited for cool homebrew games like Mechwarrior: Living Legends. The engine already had existing frameworks for things such as controlling vehicles, rendering day/night cycles, complex shader techniques for mapping textures onto bump maps in a way that doesn't stretch, conveniences in the editor for editing large amounts of geometry and placing & rendering roads (entire white papers exist for rendering/editing roads sanely in bump-map engines lol).

That said, it's clear why at first glance Cryengine seemed like a good fit for SC, you have huge swathes of space as a game problem you need to solve, lo and behold Cryengine offers a partial solution at first glance. Cryengine also featured some zero-g segments at times, which I'm sure made Chris Robert's eyes pop out of his loving sockets on one of his major coke fueled gaming benders in a sad poorly furnished mcmansion somewhere.

It's not insanely difficult, if you have any game programming experience, to hop into an engine like Cryengine and start prototyping some things. Let's create a blank level, let's make the skybox be a nice starry sky texture, let's set gravity to 0, let's subclass the vehicle class and drop in one of our models. The engine is very low friction for this hello world smoke test. So you start flying around in your lovely 3d mesh and are feeling like a programming/game development god, zooming around thinking "Wow this is gonna be EASY", then you fly to far down on the Y axis and start drowning. "what the gently caress" you whisper as you squint. It's too late though, your boss, Chris Roberts, saw this early smoke test of assets and quickly started drafting up earnest estimates on how long OTHER systems will take, as if the demo you threw together is actually complete (when it's not). If you dont know how to hire devs you might put a senior dev in place who also doesn't grok how much actual work is left to be done and enforces your boss' stupid promises based on what isn't real game development. Guns are now pointed at you to fix the "small" issue or you'll be holding up the schedule (that no one consulted you about). so you work a weekend and dive into wtf happens when Y axis < CRY_WATER_LINE_HEIGHT. You find an instance in the base player controller logic and fix it, thinking you're done, but -- gently caress it turns out the physics subsystem also uses that same CRY_WATER_LINE_HEIGHT constant to do some optimizations, so you start grepping the code for that code instance and try flipping it off, except you don't realize there are some extra subsystems hidden somewhere that don't reference that constant like they should also do their own weird rendering tricks or optimizations when Y approaches that magic value.

there's a phrase in software development and especially games: 90% of the time is spent on the last 10% of polish. the last mile problem is super loving real in gamedev, seemingly tiny things in the grand scope of what you're delivering can make or break your game experience for players, and it's always those "tiny" things that are the results of weird edge cases from literally hundreds of subsystems interacting with eachother through the engine.

now, take the water example and apply it to basically everything. most likely every single system in cryengine has some kind of limit to what it was built to do originally and there are always unexpected results when you push engines into territory they werent developed for or tested for. now if you consider how Chris is pushing people to ship lovely demos and move on instead of developing a strong foundation for the rest of the game: you start to imagine how one could half rear end a system for an effect in demo and how "ok but it wont work outside of this or with any of the other things we talked about" might fall on deaf ears to a demonstrable cant-actually-delegate-or-listen-to-reason dingus like CRoberts.

now i want to introduce the final nail in the coffin. I could write like an essay on the basic MMO problem space but I wont, i'll keep it simple: MMOs are one of the hardest possible problems to tackle in a game development context from a resource management perspective. the amount of resource expertise (developers, architects, planning) and continued cost of servers and CPU/network time are as big as it gets in game development, and not only that but your game needs to be architected incredibly precisely to fit into the featureset your MMO imagination describes. you really can spare no unnecessary complexity when attempting an MMO, your scope needs to be VERY specific for your first release ( :siren: )

Even on a basic employee headcount level, Star Citizen doesn't employ nearly the number of experienced developers required for a project of this size, not only that but we all have plenty of evidence as to CRobert's awful management styles given how many rewrites and "refactors" occur for even the existing unfinished systems. there are clear, glaring signs of bad software development planning and inexperienced game developers rushing a product (while senior ones seem to keep leaving :newlol:, weird!! ).

absolutely none of this is conducive to shipping the PU as shitizens imagine. they will never see their game. making games is really complicated, making multiplayer games is even MORE complicated, making MASSIVELY multiplayer games is THE most resource intensive & complicated from a project management perspective.

Daztek
Jun 2, 2006



Lowtax forces his daughter to play Star Citizen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgkMxk8_mT0


vvvv :laugh: vvvv

nawledgelambo
Nov 8, 2016

Immersion chariot
daz beat me to it

:(

thatguy
Feb 5, 2003

Daztek posted:

Lowtax forces his daughter to play Star Citizen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgkMxk8_mT0


vvvv :laugh: vvvv
Lock him up.

G0RF
Mar 19, 2015

Some galactic defender you are, Space Cadet.

FailureToReport posted:

drat, around what part did it give it away since you listened to it audio only, I'd genuinely like to know.

It wasn’t your audio that gave it away — I just finally looked up after hearing too much effusive praise — partly wondering “did CIG really patch the turd to greatness and I missed it?” and then i realized you were playing Elite.

Master act of trollery. It’s already probably flying around the Frontier Dev ecosphere with its eventual destination certain:



And



And maybe even:

G0RF fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Nov 26, 2017

SCtrumpHaters
Oct 28, 2017

by Nyc_Tattoo
He's literally on the streamer server. They gave him a free 600i and everything. About 50 seconds in he lets it out of the bag.

"Now that I have my hands on the 600i I have to say its super nice and they were right to design it this way. It really makes me want to buy more at the aniversary sale."

SCtrumpHaters fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Nov 26, 2017

tooterfish
Jul 13, 2013

David is drinking three cups of tea at once there.

That man knows how to English.

Virtual Captain
Feb 20, 2017

Archive Priest of the Stimperial Order

Star Citizen Good, in all things forevermore. Amen.
:pray:
I was in tears over FTR's video. :golfclap: Bravo.

FailureToReport
Nov 25, 2017

Warlord in training

SCtrumpHaters posted:

He's literally on the streamer server. They gave him a free 600i and everything. About 50 seconds in he lets it out of the bag.

Yeah, I feel like a moron for asking now, I forgot I started out with that one, I should have put that further in. Bad Failure.

SCtrumpHaters
Oct 28, 2017

by Nyc_Tattoo
Ok I just owned myself

fuckin lol I played that game last loving week. I was just listening not really watching.

tooterfish
Jul 13, 2013

SCtrumpHaters posted:

Ok I just owned myself
It's okay every now and then.

Don't overdo it though, you'll go blind.

Sarsapariller
Aug 14, 2015

Occasional vampire queen

So I guess the Banu Merchantman is back up for sale today? Just yesterday they put out some turret ship for $600 that nobody had ever seen before, and it was already in-engine with truckloads of beauty shots and will probably be out in the coming months. But the BMM is 4+ years old and they don't even have new concept art for it. How can anyone who bought that ship originally be okay with that? Why the hell would anyone buy one today? It kind of feels like most of the remaining old ships just got dropped in a memory hole, except they keep selling them.

Mangoose
Dec 11, 2007

Come out with your pants down!

Virtual Captain posted:

Here I'll help:

That's actually amazing. I don't even know why I asked for short. I'm pasting that poo poo before blocking him

MedicineHut
Feb 25, 2016


Thanks for the effort master gooncati.

MedicineHut fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Nov 26, 2017

Drunk Theory
Aug 20, 2016


Oven Wrangler

Sarsapariller posted:

So I guess the Banu Merchantman is back up for sale today? Just yesterday they put out some turret ship for $600 that nobody had ever seen before, and it was already in-engine with truckloads of beauty shots and will probably be out in the coming months. But the BMM is 4+ years old and they don't even have new concept art for it. How can anyone who bought that ship originally be okay with that? Why the hell would anyone buy one today? It kind of feels like most of the remaining old ships just got dropped in a memory hole, except they keep selling them.

Which is worse, vanishing down the memory hole, or being actively worked on. By the way, tomorrow sale is the Cutlass V31.

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TheAgent
Feb 16, 2002

The call is coming from inside Dr. House
Grimey Drawer

SCtrumpHaters posted:

Ok I just owned myself

fuckin lol I played that game last loving week. I was just listening not really watching.
this whole thread is about self ownership

the inevitable consequences of posting

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