Anticheese posted:

I really have no idea who greenlit the Hammerhead video all but saying "Hey this thing is a white elephant and maintaining this thing is a pain in the rear end that requires a lot of manual busywork" right before going HEY BUY THE HAMMERHEAD!

Lladre posted:

We are all going to have a nice collective laugh when it turns out Ortwin socked away a hundred million into his private Caribbean bank account, and the Roberts will end up dead broke with repossessed leases of everything including the kitchen sink espresso machine.

D_Smart posted:

It's nothing to do with that. For those of us who have developed multiplayer games, it almost always starts out as a single player session with stub code for all the networking bits which you later fill in. And that off-line mode is valuable for testing because without the actual data set earlier on, you have no idea how you need to streamline your code down the road.

And that's typically the problem that Star Citizen has. They somehow figured that - untouched - the baseline CryEngine network layer was adequate. It wasn't - as anyone who has played a CryEngine multiplayer game will tell you. But they decided, wtf, we're just going to make an MMO anyway.

Having done that, knowing that they're never - ever - getting an MMO out of this poo poo-show, they decided to focus on other things, while making minor to subtle revisions to the network layer in order to be able to actually come up with a proper client-server (FYI CryEngine base networking is peer-to-peer, but you can hack in a client-server model if you wanted to). It's how the PU came to be, whereby they were touting "persistence" despite the fact that there was nothing actually persistent (db store and pulls are not persistence) about it.

So, right now in 3.0, hype aside - with zero optimizations to their networking - each client in a serssion sends in excess of 4K bytes (I poo poo you not, fire up Wireshark and see) per second to the server. The server response is over 160K bytes - to every loving client. This is only part of the reason why the server shits itself so frequently.

However, there is NO fixing their networking layer without ripping it all out. They know this - that's why they haven't touched it. And even though they have yet to switch to LumberYard's own implementation (LY deprecated the base CryEngine networking), even doing that won't help because that too wasn't designed for large scale networking.

The end result? As I've written over and over, they're never - ever - getting an MMO out of this. If they don't collapse in the short-term, and somehow limp (they won't - they're hosed, it's just not news yet) along putting bandaid on the PU until they poo poo out SQ42, the closest they're ever going to get to meaningful multiplayer, is precisely where they are right now, but with fewer clients.

hot balls man no homo posted:

They've managed to buy themselves another week of life. Maybe a little less, like 5 days at the estimated burn rate. But then again, those new job postings might mean that they are cutting the fat.

Rugganovich posted:

Humble Bundle have a thing on for Java books
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/java-books

Someone with the knowledge should say a yay ot a nay for that.

TheAgent posted:

just putting together the fake salesman, VA work, mocap and the ship itself probably runs into the few hundred thousand, let alone actually getting something like that into the game

the pioneer alone probably adds tens of millions of technical debt up in this motherfucker

The Titanic posted:

I hope that some day we get a quality post mortem from this. I’d love to know how many of the problems CIG faced and continue to face are because Chris Roberts felt like everything was an easy task that should have been done in a week.

We have 6 years of proof that he thinks everything should have been done quickly.

TheAgent posted:

wouldnt you just have your robot drone do all of this 1,000 years into the future

why are people still delivering packages like its 1985

Ash1138 posted:

about $462k for today

seems low for a "pulling out all the stops" kind of day

VictorianQueerLit posted:

Nah, pulling out all the stops is near the end when they put every ship back up for sale and you get people buying whatever the whale holy grail ships are.

That and selling land.

TheAgent posted:

wouldnt you just have your robot drone do all of this 1,000 years into the future

why are people still delivering packages like its 1985

TheAgent posted:

wouldnt you just have your robot drone do all of this

Milky Moor posted:

Do I have everything right in my head here?

CIG take out a loan from Coutts with a spurious reason (leveraging the whole company and IP in the process), presumably because they couldn't make it to the year-end without the influx of money.
CIG stop refunds for a time (or are they still paused?) to stretch out what they have that little bit longer.
CIG releases 3.0 well before schedule and with seemingly no fanfare or hype. 3.0 is just dropped into the wild. According to EightAce, this may have been because Coutts had come knocking?
CIG begins a 10 Day Sale (unprecedented?) including a whole bunch of 'limited' ships and other lucrative dangling carrots. On the first two days, it makes basically the same amount of money, which is a bit strange, and then the third day drops off hard.

MilesK posted:

https://i.imgur.com/bupkmle.gifv

MilesK posted:

https://i.imgur.com/bupkmle.gifv

Hav posted:

Someone's looking to be replaced with a script.

Edit:


You have to have had some engineering or process background to understand what Agile was trying to do, then understand that it's entirely misapplied by almost everyone because there's a cherry-picking, and not a large amount of normalizing of deviance around defining what the people making the decisions about the process are looking to hide. Yeah, it's mostly bullshit, but there are very specific reasons for creating narratives (extreme programming), story points and an overall goal, but they usually miss the messy 'we're gonna work things out' and end up sitting on one person's lap.

I sat in a meeting a couple of weeks ago where three people described the same problem differently, then were overrode by their boss who described a fourth thing. That's a massive failure in alignment, and no amount of agile can get around the blind men and the elephant. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant)

Opinion ahead, beware; I suspect that a lot of this has had to do with a culture of acceptance rather than actually using a test-driven system where the _design starts with the tests_. There's a lot of mis-interpretation of 'agile' as 'not loving planning', or 'just making things work' that's beginning to bring out a lot of technical debt. However, I have been doing the equivalent of archeological forensic programming for the best part of a couple of decades.

I'd suggest that we get more celebrity driven than cargo-cult, though. Because 'X' recommends something doesn't mean that it's _right_, but there's just acceptance rather than testing. Case in point, we ignore vendor claims when it comes to performance for network devices and instead test them ourselves.

Again, opinion.


This.

And I'm shutting up about the day job now.

Milky Moor posted:

Wasn't that the first two days with Idris and Javelins?

And land is coming tomorrow is the theory, right?

A Neurotic Corncob posted: