Gerblyn posted:

Posting to say thanks for doing this, and to try and get page 2, because page 1 is loving monstrous right now.

The Titanic posted:

quote:

$6.59M raked in for the sale.

My biggest problem, that I always have with SC, is that no matter how bad it is or how much I know I have to ignore logic, I keep assuming people are not fools.

All my projections are off because I can’t accept how stupid people are about this game.

Spiderdrake posted:

It's weird how square one is "these people are insane enough to spend thousands on jpegs of spaceships" and yet they still find new, inventive ways to come off as increasingly insane.

ManofManyAliases posted:

I'm a backer who originally pledged 8k worth of items, 4k were for friends of my org who have since paid me for those items. I offloaded around 1k in the grey market and now sit on just over 3k worth of ships. I know you guys have fun with the whole Toast bit - it's cute sometimes but mostly boring others. If I were Toast, I'd likely have much more skin in the game seeing as how CIG gets ginormous discounts on ships and all.

juggalo baby coffin posted:

i saw a glimpse into the good timeline where trump isn't president, where obama passed universal healthcare, and derek smart raised 200 million for LOD 2017

croberts was crouched in an alleyway, crowdfunding from passers by, and snorting 'fool's coke' he had made out of dust and crushed up rat poison

Dusty Lens posted:

So this thread still exists but now it's Chris posting about his July blog.

juggalo baby coffin posted:

yeah some things never change no matter which reality you flee to

Dogeh posted:

D_Smart on twitter posted:

Well, if the latest Star Citizen patch seems better on the CPU, it's cuz after MANY weeks, whoever left Sleep (0) in the code, has now changed it to Sleep (1).

Star Citizen still has DOZENS in there. Each one can tied up a CPU to 100% utilization.

They've got over 400 CrySpinLock references in this. OMG! Please call up CryTek and ask them why that's very - very - bad.

CSocketIOManagerSelect::PushUserMessage were removed by Lumberyard, but still in Star Citizen.

At this rate, I'm just going to have to keep disassembling this whole mess and just fix the performance bugs myself. God I hope they sue me. That would be hilarious.

They better credit you when the intern reads this thread and says,

"Erm, guys. You'll never guess.
Derek just solved all our framerate issues"

reddit posted:

In render mesh management, code lock contention has been optimized. Generally, frequent CPU spikes on server and client side due to spin locks have been removed. The relevant changes mention in last week’s report as in-progress have been submitted. People on the PTU have observed the effect of a degenerated "spin lock". A spin lock used to control access to a shared resource when multiple threads are trying to work on it, such as a file or a memory space. It allows for very fast resource transfer between thread, but threads waiting for the resource are consuming a huge amount of CPU while waiting. It's useful as long as each thread doesn't wait long for the resource, otherwise it becomes a huge performance drain on all CPU cores

D_Smart posted:

Well, bad news. CIG didn't remove any spinlocks or sleep(1) calls in the latest patch. hence the continued hangs, crashes and performance issues. there are still 600+ spinlocks and 400+ sleep(1) calls still in this patch.

They lied. Shocking, I know.

Using IDA disassembler and Hex-Rays Decompiler, you can see this a clear as day in the current and previous versions.

There is NO fixing bad architecture and design; so I don't expect ANYTHING they do to yield ANY positive results in the short term. There will be crashes, hangs, and even worse performance issues if they ever survive long enough to progress beyond 3 barren moons.

AP posted:

Worth Clicking: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/206947640?t=04h09m00s (video: Commando beheaded due to bug)

Toops posted:

My favorite part is not that the server crashes just as he's arriving at the place he wanted to go, in the ship he wanted to be in (which probably took an hour), and instantly got a criminal record due to CIG's buggy bullshit "criminal" system. No. My favorite part is that he muses to his subs "hey, I wonder when I reconnect if I'll be at the same place in my ship because of persistence. Also, I'll probably still have my criminal record, due to persistence."

Did he spawn in to his last position? No.
Did he spawn in the ship he was last in? No.
Did he wake up back in his Port Olisar wank-pod? Yes.
Did he have a criminal record? No.

There's no persistence man. This game's never coming out.

For the record, persistence is one of the trickiest things to get right, especially on the programming side. You have to account for every edge case. It can't have any bugs, because persistence bugs are what make people ragequit/uninstall/refund games. It means losing progress, and even the Stariest of Citizens will rightly lose their poo poo if persistence isn't near-perfect.

PederP posted:

The CryTek top brass don't play softball. I know someone who was asked during a job interview there if he had an SO, because they preferred staff without attachments (family got in the way of crunch). They also had a tendency to try and trick applicants into writing actual production code to be "evaluated". Add to that the way CryTek treated their staff during their recent financial crisis, trying to convince them not to act on missing paychecks (which in Europe can cause a loss of ability to get compensation in case of bankruptcy), was pretty lovely. They certainly don't deserve any pity. But I am pretty sure they'll sure hardcore if they can.

Hav posted:

"A 1000 ways to die on Daymar"

Ramps
Doors
Standing still
Running
Getting out of your chair
Slow walking
Cronenberging
Being shot

Colostomy Bag posted:

reddit posted:

I finally compleated a mission!
My method of bug testing has been to attempt a cargo mission. At first, it was just to find the bugs. But after about 25 attempts, I just wanted to complete one.
So after crashes, so many many crashes. After getting stuck in Mobiglass mode; dying from standing up; dying by carrying a box onto another physics grid; having boxes disappear; having boxes jump back to the start; missions going away; locations going away; my ship going away; starmap failers; more crashes; framerate dropping to 0; mission just not acknowledging delivery; mission resetting after dropping the box; the interaction key failing after arrival and, I kid you not, a power failure right as I was about to deliver.
I finally dropped off a box and was acknowledged for it.
Over 50 attempts. I know it was the latest patch. But I can't help but feel vindicated.
Look forward to more attempts.

jfc

To think he pays for this privilege.

Ursine Catastrophe posted:

Right here is pretty much the be all and end all of the last 6 years of CIG-related development hell. The "they built a roof before building the walls/painted the walls before doing the drywall" analogy has been trotted out more than once but it's worth repeating. Roberts hired carpenters with the intent of building a house, said "wait no I want to build a castle", got angry and fired everyone who said "well, our foundation and first floor is for a house, so if you want to make it bigger we're going to need to start over from scratch", and now everyone is making a massive Chernobyl-esque sarcophagus out of paper maché and elmer's glue, and they're trying to prop that facade up from the inside with a finite number of 2x4s that they keep stealing from people on the other side of the house. And it's starting to rain.

Also there's no carpenters, it's just college grads who majored in basket weaving.

Daztek posted:

Sarsapariller posted:

Daztek posted:

I'm not sure what the context of this is, but I'm sure it's good for star citizen

Yeah no big we'll just swap VR in later that's how all the really good VR games do it right it's not like they need entirely new versions released because literally every interface has to be rethought for VR boy it sure would be a problem if we'd sold the game repeatedly as being the ultimate VR experience or something back when VR was the big new fad oh well gently caress it we're chasing new fads now like face over IP hahaha yeah sure go ahead and buy that camera see what it gets you oops I wasn't supposed to say that out loud I've been working for 96 hours straight oh well gently caress you, you'll buy anything.

Sarsapariller posted:

This place is really hopping- there's like 5 commando ships here which for Star Citizen is the equivalent of the Stormwind auction house steps. Naturally my FPS takes a poo poo due to all of this activity and I end up in a kind of uncontrolled drift-crash into the main tower. Luckily my ship and the largely-glass tower come away completely unscathed from another 2000mph impact. Somehow I manage to hang onto my bandolier of clips and medpens as well. Fidelity! I request landing, one system which miraculously has not actually failed yet, and am directed to one of the big hangar pits with the door that slides open for me to lower my ship through.

Sarsapariller posted:

I cannot think of anything more fundamental than inventory management for an MMO and trading game. It's such a solved problem, too. It's just lists and DB calls! How do you gently caress that up so badly? Nobody, not one person on earth, is going to have an improved gameplay experience because they had to manage every individual clip for their stupid rifle.

It gets even worse when you go to the shop for ships. At least you sort of vaguely know what a rifle or a pistol looks like. Everything in the ship shops is just a box with greebles glued on to it. There's no information on them at all except price. Oh, I can get an Aegis Regulator for 5000 credits? Great! What is that? Is it a shield? What size is it? Is it even compatible with my ship? Is it better than what I've got? Oh this one's a power plant, you say! How do you even plug that in? The only mod points on most ships are the guns on the outside.

On top of that, now you can't even spawn shopkeepers by just giving them an inventory list. Some poor slob artist has to painstakingly go through and set down every item in the shop just so, and then some poor rear end in a top hat programmer is going to have to wire all the triggers so clicking on it opens the Moby-Glass to the right page. I've already found several guns that are priced wrong from the ones right next to them.

The whole thing is hosed.

his nibs posted:

https://clips.twitch.tv/AffluentGentleOstrichPMSTwin (video: Disco Lando: "Ryan Archer? Ryan Archer actually drew.")

SelenicMartian posted:

boviscopophobic posted:

I noticed that unrelated text subtitles flicker briefly onto the screen occasionally, as if the guy is continually in telepathic conversation with NPCs all over the 'Verse. This isn't the first 3.0 video where I've seen this phenomenon. Just a couple of instances below:

Someone in the verse is probably interacting with the shop at the same time, and this thing broadcasts every action of every player to every client regardless of range and sublevel.

Ursine Catastrophe posted:

More likely is that everything is broadcast to everyone but the decision to show the dialogue is client-authoritative, and said client is chugging hard enough that it shows up for a split second before the client manages to figure out that it shouldn't be shown. The alternative was probably "if we default to not showing the dialogue, sometimes it doesn't show up at all".

Naturally this opens new and exciting future avenues for griefing. Competitive PvP games like Counterstrike, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft have a lot of special code server side to make sure things like "positional data for people that your client shouldn't be able to see behind a wall" aren't broadcast in the first place, to prevent client hacks like "making the walls invisible" from actually doing anything for you.

Sarsapariller posted:

D_Smart posted:

We make fun of them for the lols, but we're now down to the point where we have to start taking this poo poo seriously because, you know, lives and bank accounts are at a risk.

Explain to me how lives are at risk, though? Bank accounts I'll grant you, but really even if Star Citizen were to disappear tomorrow I kind of feel like the dudes who'd invest their family's life savings into scam video games in pursuit of community and meaning are gonna find some way to lose that money.

I do think there will eventually be something that they declare as the final game. Years late, tens of millions over budget, and with mechanics that range from passable to holy-crap-how-did-that-ever-get-released. It'll be billed as an MMO but be largely played as a single player wandering-and-trading game, because they forgot to balance any of the economics to make piracy or bounty hunting worthwhile other than as griefing professions. It will be swiftly forgotten about within months as it is laughably far behind other games of the same period. The idiots who sunk 50,000 dollars into it will still feel justified because it came out, after all, and the amount they spent was so long ago that they're no longer feeling buyer's remorse.

Only two questions remain for me at this point- how can they possibly put out all of the ships they've sold, with all of the mechanics they've promised, without going broke? And if they don't release them how can they cut and run having sold people stuff they didn't deliver?

Sunswipe posted:

Drunk Theory posted:

Ben he is just background Wing Commander noise on Twitter these days. And not much of that even. He could probably vanish at this point and only weirdos like us would notice.

It's kinda funny how CIG will be in full crisis management mode over something and Ben's Twitter just has something like "They're not printing any Star Trek books this month. "

MilesK posted:

Like, according to twitter Ben has been playing Animal Crossing.

No way that low fidelity console bullshit is more fun than alpha 3.0

Sarsapariller posted:

Man you should see the rage going on over the Constellation Phoenix right now. They sold this thing as a super up-gunned version of the Constellation with better shields, better guns, better missiles, a "Point defense turret" in addition to the two regular turrets, better armor... it was supposed to be some kind of luxury VIP transport. Then they released the hangar version 2 years ago, and it was just a white version with a hot tub inside.

Now they're doing the inevitable "Refactoring" and literally all of the stuff I just mentioned has been dropped except for the hot tub. It's just a mangled version of the regular Constellation with less missiles and a fatter midsection to accommodate your frat parties. There's not even any gameplay reason for it to exist. But it still costs like $125 more than the regular versions- gently caress you if you don't like it!


I would argue that this is not really a new kind of scam at all. It is a cult and a con. It turns out that cults have always been especially seductive to exactly the kind of people Star Citizen routinely preys on- loners with inferiority complexes who don't really have a lot of experience of what a healthy community should be. They get told that no they really are special, and here's a place for people just like them- give a little more, and you can enter at a higher rank- because if you can throw that kind of money around you've obviously already earned the respect! The only thing they don't really have is a good messianic leader because Chris is kind of a fuckup and Sandi is a transparently evil grasper. I guess you could say that's the unique part- it's kind of a crowdsourced cult, where they all take turns "Inspiring the faithful" and nobody gets to sleep with the groupies because women are 100% repelled by this thing.

PC Gamer posted:

The 10 most dubious in-game purchases
Star Citizen: Land deeds
You can pay $50 to $100 for a claim to a plot of virtual land in a game that isn't out yet thanks to Star Citizen's land purchasing system that lets you secure a 4km x 4km "lot" or an 8km x 8km "estate" for your outlay. You don't need a land license to build in Star Citizen, but owning the land offers you protection against vandals, who will be committing an in-game crime for messing around with your private property. You can't choose where your plot goes yet, because Star Citizen's planned universe doesn't exist yet, but in the meantime you can look at a picture of a patch of Moon and dream.

Dusty Lens posted:

Released with 1.3 in Oct of 2015
No longer operational as of 2.2 in March 2016
Removed from the store sometime around Dec 10 2017

Virtual Captain posted:

Wtf is flashfire I asked google:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/electronic-access/Weapon-Roms/Hornet-Flashfire-Specialty-Mount
"Want some bigger bang for your credit… literally? These carefully designed mounts will transform larger hardpoints on the Hornet and Cutlass-class platforms to allow them to attach large weaponry"

Basically take your [x] slots and turn them into a [x]+1 slots! You'd be an idiot not to upgrade. Was this sold before they even had the dogfighting module?
Imagine if Blizzard started selling the "Titan's Grip" talent (lets your character hold 2-handed weapons with one hand) before they even finished the original game, lol.

Drunk Theory posted:

And then decided that no actually that makes warriors overpowered. So we aren't adding that talent anymore. If you bought that talent already, we'll figure out how to compensate you at some point.

Tokamak posted:

This is straight up P2W.
Pay money for a consumable (seven, twenty four hour uses) that gives +1 size on a hardpoint. I have to give CIG credit though, 80 cents is a steal for a item like this. In other P2W mobile games, you're probably paying at least $5 for something that significantly subverts the game balance for a week.

Dusty Lens posted:

It cost $8. To mount a gun. Not the gun. But a different way to put your gun on your ship.

They sell different versions of this for $3 and $5 I believe. Per mount. So about $20 to make it so all of the guns on your Hornet track with your mouse. Roughly.

Sarsapariller posted:

Spectrum: Why is the graphics pipeline waiting for server updates?
Reddit: CIG Lead Network Programmer - "Netcode does not make clients run slowly, and never has."

quote:

There are a few myths that seem to get repeated quite a lot - please allow me to dispel some of them for you:

* The graphics pipeline does not wait for server updates.
* Server FPS does not affect client FPS.
* Netcode does not make clients run slowly, and never has.
* Netcode does not make servers run slowly, anymore, even though we've added more clients.
* You get better performance on newer servers because there are fewer players on them so your client has to do less work - like physics, animation, IFCS, and entity updates.
* Players hacking the game to play PU in "offline mode" get better performance than they do online because their clients don't have to deal with all the load generated by 49 other players.

What is so hard about fixing the performance problems is that the game is pushing the engine way beyond what it was designed to handle. Fixing that means fundamentally changing how systems work while simultaneously trying not to break everything in the game that uses them. Big performance gains that require making big changes take time. Sometimes we have to do a lot of restructuring before we can even start working on an optimisation. Making all these changes can introduce a lot of bugs, and fixing those takes even more time. Let's also not forget that performance is not the only goal here - we're also trying to achieve fidelity levels not seen before. Fidelity is often the enemy of performance, so we find ourselves having to optimize even further than we otherwise would have had to.

Important clarifications from CIG! It's not the net code that makes the game choke and die, it's the number of players on the server that makes the game choke and die!

A very important distinction because they might improve the netcode some day, but the number of players running around is only ever going to get worse. And there's no real fix in sight, and probably never will be! Thanks CIG!

Foo Diddley posted:

How in the gently caress can anybody read this bullshit and think that the project is in good hands

chochmah posted:

some are coping the usual way: "It could be thread contention that is blocking the CPU from being 100% utilized"
some inch a little bit closer towards the realization that not all is well in the state of croberts: "Me thinks you opened a can of worms with your response...".

TheLastRoboKy posted:

Oh thank god for a second there I thought Star Citizen was hosed beyond all recovery, but it's an issue with player numbers that'll sort itself out when they all get sick of playing at 5fps and quit.

Mr Fronts posted:

Look, stop over-reacting. All the CIG dev said was,

"What is so hard about fixing the performance problems is that the game is pushing the engine way beyond what it was designed to handle. Fixing that means fundamentally changing how systems work while simultaneously trying not to break everything in the game that uses them."

December 2017. A hundred and seventy eleventy million billion dollars. The solution is to fundamentally change how an inadequate engine does things in a way that doesn't break everything.

Once again, CIG shows those stupid AAA publishers how it's meant to be done.

Foo Diddley posted:

Half a motherfucking decade into development and they are just now realizing that their FPS engine can't do an MMO. And they can't just scrap and rewrite everything that they need to, because people are playing the game already. They have to completely overhaul the engine, but do it bit by bit without breaking anything too badly, so that they can show constant progress to the backers. Good luck with that, CIG

Maybe the incompetent dickhead in charge should have looked at more than screenshots when he was deciding what engine to use

Virtual Captain posted:

"netcode" packs so much of SC's problems into a tiny neat ignorable box. All CIG had to do is say "don't worry we'll improve the netcode when all the major features are complete" and they would be fine.

I imagine there is a lot of rear end covering and throwing other departments under the bus in CIG's company culture, this guy was just doing what Chris taught him to do.

D_Smart posted:

What Clive wrote is absolutely and patently insane. If I didn't read that with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. wow.

It clearly shows - yet another example of why this project is FUBAR.

I am writing an article right now about it. For the record, and in case there was ANY doubt, I called it already...http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/5949/

Sarsapariller posted:

Derek you're obviously mistaken. He's not just any network engineer. Citizens have recognized him as a netcode God. Bow before your betters.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/7j0jcf/clive_johnson_netcode_god_wants_to_do_a_special/?st=jb28i01c&sh=d242ff8d

Suddenly we're all really excited for a 40 minute episode about latency and packet size.

Toops posted:

HAHAHA holy poo poo. That guy has no loving idea what he’s talking about. That’s written like your Michael Scott level manager or customer service rep that hears the engineers say words and thinks if he re-uses the words that means he’s an expert on the subject.

Jesus what a fiasco.

Cao Ni Ma posted:

LOL

"Netcode isn't hosed guys, its just that all the other players being around you (on an entirely different moon/planet/station) is making YOUR client have to work harder" are they serious? The fact that you client has to process any of that information at all means your netcode is hosed

reddit posted:

This cig response has me genuinely concerned. My concern has always been 'netcode' and how the amount of players effects fps, to a point where the game is not playable. If they have to reduce the amount of players to single digits then it isnt an mmo. Probably the first time I'de had serious doubts about the game, i've always just had faith that they would be able to make it work.

PederP posted:

quote:

Server FPS does not affect client FPS.

Server frames-per-second? Huh? Is the server rendering stuff? Best case he's trying to use terms the players understand - worst case the server is just a modified client acting as a "scene/level/map host". If that's the case the current server tech is a dead end, and needs to be ditched for an actual server implementation. From his tone, he's annoyed that the servers and netcode is being blamed for architectural issues. But even if the servers are not currently heavily loaded, they are not going to scale if they are frankenclients hosting "maps". I don't believe such an architecture can be incrementally reworked to do what they want.

Did they really not consider writing server-side software to run this? Bugs and instability when running an alpha with an active and demanding player base (not to mention the not quite feature-locked person in charge) is not entirely unreasonable. Ignoring the most important aspect of making an MMO - server tech - is not reasonable. And reading that post, I get a feeling there is no real server. If that's the case, I expect a Server 2.0 being announced at some point.

Toops posted:

I still can’t get over the fact that the CLIENT has to run every single player’s loving physics simulation. I mean jesus christ. Each client is ALREADY doing their own physics simulation locally, Just send the position updates to the server, what kind of broke rear end poo poo is this.

You know what this means right? If my client is running your physics simulation, you are sending me the hardware inputs for your mouse, keyboard, joystic, pedals, etc. How else would I run your physics simulation without inputs?

Now just multiply that by number_of_players_in_server. That sounds scalable right? Insane.

Either he’s lying, he’s wrong because he doesn’t understand game development, or he’s telling the truth. None of those are a good look.

Sarsapariller posted:

Worth Watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TGTYOS44H4&t=1490s (video: ship explodes buggedly)


THE NETCODE IS FINE THIS IS FINE

Scruffpuff posted:

This is something I called in my July blog two years ago, when I stated the following: "a project with at least one insurmountable problem never passes zero percent completion, no matter how many other development goals are met."

This is independent of Chris Roberts involvement being its own 100% guarantee of project failure.

CIG keeps showing these small, incremental pieces of complete bullshit, and passes each and every one of them off as progress toward some amorphous goal and endpoint. No, CIG, you're not X% completed - you're 0% completed, and you'll always be 0% completed no matter how much work you do, because your core technology is impossible as designed and built. You hosed up from the jump, and now you're full-on hosed and there's nothing you can do about it except scrap everything, fire Chris, start all over again, and plan it right. That's how you get past 0%.

Loxbourne posted:

The Tenets of the Cult of Christ Roberts and the Church of Latter-Day Star Citizens. The words carved on the golden pages of the Great Book of Dreams, whispered by everyone from Ben Lesnick on down:

Star Citizen is the BEST GAME EVER

Self-explanatory but also the tenet that needs the most proselytising and defending. Star Citizen is THE BEST and so it automatically gets associated in their minds with all the other BEST THINGS EVER (the theorycrafting, the dreams of massive battles, the org politics which every citizen expects to win, and so forth). A whole pile of weird citizen behaviour stems from the need to keep Star Citizen's reputation pristine - and in reality, to keep it on the pedestal in their minds. Star Citizen Good, in all things forevermore. Amen.

Enter the conspiracy theories about Big Publishing Sabotage, the furious projection of SC's problems onto other games, and so on. P2W? Delays? Boring missions? Even being in alpha for an alarmingly long time. You can tell exactly what the backers are worried about in Star Citizen at any given moment by reading what they're accusing Elite Dangerous and Line of Defence of doing.

Star Citizen backers are an elite who have recognised an Important Project and invested in it.

Important for tribalism and also for a sense of self-importance. Citizens are big important people. They're saving PC gaming, you know. That's why we see weird misuse of financial terminology (pledges are an "investment") that can even be contradicted in the same post ("CIG owes you NOTHING"). Needless to say, the "invester" stuff gets cited when a Citizen wants to feel powerful and the Might of CIG (ironclad TOS, "refunds are scams", etc) gets invoked when a Citizen feels another citizen is getting uppity.

Chris Roberts is a genius who surrounds himself with other geniuses. He and his circle must not be judged by the standards of ordinary mortals.

The cult of personality. You gotta have faith in the man himself. Cultists can see Star Citizen is a vastly ambitious game that would normally be impossible to make, they just tell themselves Chris can make it because he's a genius. A hero from their childhood. Losing faith in Chris's ability to make the game, or his benevolent attitude towards his followers, is repeatedly described on the refunds subreddit as the moment people decided to pull out.

This is the tenet that supports and partially fuels the LARP-like behaviour from CIG (of course Chris's ego supplies the rest). Chris and CIG's uncontested genius is essential to silencing any doubts that might form. CIG has the best people working round the clock on Star Citizen! Networking guy is a "networking God", Sandi is "the best marketer ever", and so forth. Any of their employees must be the Best Guys Ever At X. And it's entirely acceptable to spend huge sums of money to buy top talent, who are instantly promoted to being top talent just because they work at CIG.

A CIG staffer who doesn't act like Top Talent rankles with the faithful. This is why you'll sometimes see cultists furiously decry a leaver or even an indiscreet current employee as only a minor flunky. He's not acting right to fit the vision in their heads of CIG's Mighty Beings. Chris's and even Sandi's behaviour is acceptable to the cult because that's just how their idea of a rockstar game coder acts. It's what they'd do if they were him.

I will get to fly my spaceship and it will be glorious and awesome and just like my dreams.

"DON'T TOUCH THE SPACESHIPS". Self-explanatory and also ineeringly precise. The cultist's specific dreams are the ones that Star Citizen will conform with. How long do you think B'Tak would last even in the game most of his fellow backers want to play? A citizen knows their ships will be amazing and totally worth the "investment" and let them live out whatever space dreams they've brought to the table from their own lives, without interruption from awkward deaths or risk of running out of content. A Cultist will never be bad at his chosen profession especially if that profession is "space badass". That's what the faithless masses are for.

As pointed out already, CIG messes with this at their extreme peril. The Grey Market can be accepted under this tenet because "a ship is worth the investment", but if CIG suggest a ship might not be as good as the citizens thought? FIRE AND WOE.

The masses will admire the ships I pledged to back. They will wish they had one and weep tears of longing.

The Citizens must have better ships than everyone else. They paid, dammit (in money, time, and faith), they suffered the jeers and mockeries of the knowlessmen. The Cult's promised heaven is a place where a Citizen can gun down latecomers and have them gasp in awe at his amaaaazing ships that he was granted as just recompense for his faith in the project. It's his rightful reward.

My dreams are important to CIG.

The theorycraft fuel. CIG is the best company and Star Citizen is the best game and it's going to be every good thing I ever dreamed of. The means by which CIG will design, implement, or even know of the Citizen's dreams are just a sacred mystery of the Cult.

Backers will hiss and snarl at CIG if this tenet is threatened, even though this seems contradictory to other tenets. If this comes under pressure, from CIG nailing down a mechanic or an ill-judged remark on a livestream, the cult get very angry and this morphs into a more threatening form: My dreams are shared by a silent majority who agree with me. CIG would be stupid to go against me and the secret army of backers who agree with me.

This creates one of the sadder cult beliefs - that CIG read the forums and monitor it for good ideas, so their theorycrafting will be recognised and put into the game. If one of the CIG leads said he never read Spectrum, there'd be an explosion within hours.

CIG will reward me for the faith I have shown. I rise in CIG's esteem by performing acts of faith.

This, this this this, is where a fundamental disconnect exists between CIG and its cult, and if the cult ever do rise up it will probably be because of a fracture that starts here. I could have phrased this as "CIG will reward me for buying more ships", but that's not actually how the fandom tell themselves the system works. Citizens believe they will catch CIG's eye and be rewarded for preaching, bringing in new backers (okay that worked for a while), posting praise on the subreddits, shouting down unbelievers, and owning goons/refunders/Derek with sick burns.

Except...you don't rise in the fandom by showing faith. Maybe you did once - citizens can remember the days of beer shipments and gift crates and shoutouts on Around The Verse. But that doesn't work anymore. CIG just expect you to turn up to be milked and get very indignant when you don't. You gain CIG's attention by Buying More Ships. CIG are veeeeery careful to cloak Buying More Ships as having faith in Star Citizen. They call it pledging, they constantly thank backers for their support, they dole out rewards like PTU access. Backers see streamers who stream because they're paid by CIG marketing, but they're told that the streamers do it out of sheer love of the game. But the fundamental thing that gets a cultist that sweet, sweet attention from the Divine is to buy the current ship on sale. New cash only please, no melting.

CIG can only push this so far. Backers are possessive and resent any suggestion that others might be rewarded if they haven't shown sufficient faith (and every backer is sure they've shown more faith then their neighbours). The anger around the Evocati centres on the way CIG created an inner circle whose members weren't considered worthy amongst the wider community. Worse, Evocati members describe a broken game even if they do so in effusive tones. They should be singing hymns of divine ecstacy.

===

I won't claim this maps out all the tenets. There's one or two around Derek I want to explore in a later post (particularly the idea that the Cult has an ideal of Derek and actually likes it when he acts in certain ways). And most of this stuff is an unspoken understanding between backers rather than things they discuss in public. I've mapped these out largely by taking note of what makes Citizens rage the hardest.

But if you're wondering why an innocuous comment about network performance has produced an absurdly disproportionate response from the Backer Hordes...well, he contradicted one of the unspoken truths of the Faith. That must be shouted down, must must must, before it echoes for too long in a Citizen's mind and he starts to ask himself forbidden questions.

Golli posted:

Cloud Imperium Games LLC updated their California Statement of Information on 12/6/17 (2 years late).

The only changes of note are they finally notified the state that they are no longer on Sunset Blvd. and they changed the business activities from "Game Development and Publishing" to "Game Development"

So maybe they need a publisher now?

e: They also created a new LLC on 11/30/17. Roberts Space Industries LLC (a separate entity from Roberts Space Industries Corp)

Solarin posted:

Beet Wagon posted:

nothing shocking here, but extremely funny if true

crobcoin is in

AP posted:

You haven't considered meshed forums that will support thousands of blogs.

Eldragon posted:

Daztek posted:

Derek first had to build up his blogs, so technically crying wolf only started two weeks ago

You're right, Derek's Wolf Crying is still in alpha, and shouldn't be judged by normal "Called It" standards. It's well documented that Cassandra took 8 years to carve her omens into stone before presenting them to Agamemnon.

SC Thread posted:

On the twelfth day of Christmas, Chris Roberts gave to me

Twelve fudders fudding
Eleven whales a-milking
Ten united Stimpires
Nine days of mocap
(Ben) Eight all the pies
Seven frames per second
Six banks a-lending
FIVE DEREK BLOGS
Four polished turds
Three con men
Two turtlenecks

And an invite to Evocati.

Scruffpuff posted:

Here comes Crobber Claus
Here comes Crobber Claus
Right down Crobber Claus way
CIG needs all your money
Send it all their way

Christmas time means lots of JPEGs
They make everything right
Too bad there's not a game to play cause
Backers just ain't too bright

Breetai posted:

I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus,
Under the Christmas tree last night.
Sexual contact is a sin to the Stimperor,
So I set the two of them alight.

Mne nravitsya posted:

Just had a couple emails back and forth with an old friend who is in the LA office on this nightmare, and he essentially said that (for him personally) he is just there to pull a steady paycheck, and that he and a couple other devs are using CIG to pay the bills while they work during off times to develop their mobile game. He said that much of the “worker level people” in the company are using this as a “getting paid to work on their demo reels” type of gig, and nothing more, because the passion and morale are gone, and no one ever gets heard for their cool ideas, because management takes their ideas and presents them as their own to upper management.

Also dropped a little tidbit, that a couple of the trolls on Reddit (and maybe here, but he won’t elaborate) are actively trolling the community out of spite because they hate the company and need to burn off steam. I believe I know one of them in here, but he posts very infrequently, so I can’t pin him down yet.

Take it for what it’s worth


actually it is not entirely uncommon that angry employees do this from time to time - or put horrific easter eggs in games and movies that many people never catch - but occasionally they do. As Derek knows the old Fatbabies site, employees would go on their from time to time to rail against and attack people and employers about their/and others games, because they were so disenfranchised by whatever company/whoever manager they were working for.

The Game Illuminati was full of this for years as well.

Scruffpuff posted:

Not to spoil the E.L.E., but there's a money panic going on behind the scenes at CIG right now. It goes along the lines that CR thought the game would be done by now, and he also banked on selling fuckloads of copies "off the shelf."

Obviously neither of those things happened, or will happen. So now they're juggling the following hilariously contradictory financial balls:

- Need to reduce staff to cut costs
- Not making it look like they're cutting staff to cut costs
- Needing more staff to get the "game" working
- Added expense of hosting "MMO" style persistent game servers
- Keeping the ship sales coming to cover those added expenses
- Having nothing to show that would encourage continued spending

And last but very much not least:

- Rejuvenating the existing flagging backer morale for more cash
- Hilariously, and I am not making this up, a marketing push for SQ42 meant to compete with COD and is literally being counted on to bring in millions in new money

Which ball will be dropped first, I wonder?

Hint: the SQ42 major-league push, along with all its advertising and marketing, was supposed to be ready to roll by this Friday's launch of The Last Jedi.

It was supposed to be ready, but it's not. The deadline was officially missed. It doesn't really matter what they show now, or when they show it. The date was everything.

quote:

Good poo poo. Like actually previews in theaters?

Actual financial forecasting was done based on that becoming reality.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house
Not a peripheral was working, not even my mouse;
The locks were spun by the coders with care,
In hopes that St. Roberts soon would be there;
The vackers were nestled all snug in their pods,
While visions of pirate slavery danced in their heads


And Moma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's parp—‌
When out at the door there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the pod to see what was the matter.
Away to the carpet I glitched in a flash,
Tore open my anus, and threw up udhelsgsvwof.
The moon on the breast of the naked commando,
Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below;
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny engineers,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Roberts.
More rapid than eagles his hands explained,
And he whistled, and shouted, and call'd them by name:
"Now! Lando, now! Lesnick, now! Brian and Tony,
"On! Erin, on! Sandi, on! Coders and Artists;
"To the top of the cash! To the top of the pile!
"Now sale away! Sale away! Sale away all!"
As dry leaves that before the aegis hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, blast off to the sky;
So up to the stratosphere the coursers they flew,
With the engine full of bugs—‌and St. Roberts too:
And then in a twinkling, I heard on the spectrum
The prancing and pawing of each hand waving.
As I dreamed in my head, and was turning around,
Down the turret St. Roberts phased through the bound(ary):
He was dress'd all in black, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnish'd with coke stains and soot;
A bundle of ideas was flung on his back,
And he look'd like a peddler just opening his pack:
His eyes‍—‌how they twinkled! His dimples: how merry,
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the teeth of his grin was as white as his snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had everything to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And hosed all the cvar lines; then turn'd with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose
And giving a nod, he winked as he rose.
He sprung to his porsche 1911 sport coupe with all the options and gols rims witha "cuckable" license plate,
And drove away in the sunset, to release another product late
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight‍—‌

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Hav posted:

Just leaving this here;

https://www.scribd.com/document/367101474/Crytek-v-CIG

Jobbo_Fett posted:

D_Smart posted:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/940988268572807168

Mirificus posted:

Crytek v. CIG (Uploaded by qwints): https://www.scribd.com/document/367101474/Crytek-v-CIG

ManofManyAliases posted:

What CryTek alleges and what the facts are could very well be two different worlds here. CryTek is alleging breach of contract, insomuch that infringement on IP is a consequence hereto. CryTek also had to make its engineers available for corroboration, which might have been hard to do with all of the financial troubles they've encumbered:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-12-11-former-employee-sues-crytek-istanbul
https://www.pcgamesn.com/crytek-wage-crisis-black-sea-studio
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/crytek-financial-troubles/1/
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/5wzlf2/crytek_employee_here_havent_been_paid_in_2017/
https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/source-crytek-is-sinking-wages-are-unpaid-talent-leaving-on-a-daily-basis/

etc.

They, themselves, could have breached. This is not clear yet.

Moreover, the suit itself alleges that CIG halted use of CryTek engine in 2016 (star engine in play), yet they want to lay claim to a breach when engaging Faceware in 2017. They also allege breach for SQ42, yet LumberYard is used for its development.

At worst: I see a settelement since it's completely obvious this is nothing more than a cash grab.
At best: a jury trial in CA was requested so good luck to Cry in trying to prove preponderance

XK posted:

Just lol that mspaint scribble is now highly likely to be a critical piece of evidence in a lawsuit.

Dark Off posted:

AP posted:

A preview of today's bugsmashers episode.

alphabettitouretti posted:

spacetoaster posted:

Somebody else did it.

Dogeh posted:

To the newly registered Skadden lawyers dudes who just registered an SA account

Bayonnefrog posted:

Official CIG reponse:

"We are aware of the Crytek complaint having been filed in the US District Court. CIG hasn’t used the CryEngine for quite some time since we switched to Amazon’s Lumberyard. This is a meritless lawsuit that we will defend vigorously against, including recovering from Crytek any costs incurred in this matter."

Pretty much as expected. Generic lawyer speak.

D_Smart posted:

To add insult to injury, they are linking to Lumberyard on the CryTek logo. Scroll down, click on CryTek logo.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/contest/the-next-great-starship

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

https://i.imgur.com/i2RbqNY.mp4

D_Smart posted:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/940988268572807168
(tweet: CryTek has followed through on its threat to sue RSI/CIG for a litany of things, and have hired one of the best law firms in the US. *link to filing*)

TheAgent posted:

this is bad. like really bad

quote:

Section 2.1.2 of the GLA expressly states that CIG has a license only to "embed CryEngine in the Game and develop the Game." The GLA limits the use of the CryEngine computer program to a single video game called Star Citizen.

21. Exhibit 2 of the GLA states that "the Game does not include any content being sold and marketed separately," such as content "sold and marketed as a separate, standalone PC game."

22. On December 16, 2015, Defendants announced that "Squadron 42," a single-player video game involving space combat, would be sold separately from Star Citizen.

23. On January 29, 2016, Defendants made a further public announcement about Squadron 42, stating that it would be made available for purchase as a stand-alone video game.
24. On February 5, 2016, Crytek notified Defendants that their plan to distribute Squadron 42 as a standalone game was not covered by the GLA's license, because the GLA did not grant Defendants a license to embed CryEngine in any game other than Star Citizen.

25. On February 14, 2016, Defendants moved forward with their plan for Squadron 42 notwithstanding their failure to obtain a license and began offering the video game for separate purchase. As a result, Defendants are intentionally and willfully using CryEngine without a license and in violation of copyright laws.

26. On December 23, 2016, in reference to Star Citizen and Squadron 42, Defendants announced that "oth games are currently in development and are backed by a record-breaking $139 million crowd funded effort."

27. Crytek has not been compensated for Defendants' unlicensed use of Crytek technology in the Squadron 42 game, and has been substantially harmed by being deprived of that compensation, which would ordinarily include a substantial up-front payment as well as a substantial royalty on game sales.

lol at CIG hoisting themselves from their own petard


the great thing is you can be a layman and totally see how loving bad this is

that filing is a goddamn bullet to the back of the head

Virtual Captain posted:

quote:

On May 6, 2015, Defendants began posting a series of videos online titled "Bugsmashers." The videos contain excerpts of information from CryEngine that were confidential, in breach of the GLA, and should not have been shown to the public. The series continues today.

CryEngine choice never seems to stop paying dividends... in comedy gold.

TheAgent posted:

this could easily be a $50m to $100m+ lawsuit

quote:

B. Defendants Removed Crytek Trademarks and Copyright Notices from Their Games and Marketing Materials Without Permission
28. Sections 2.8.1, 2.8.2, and 2.8.3 of the GLA contained promises by Defendants that they would prominently display Crytek's trademarks and copyright notices in the Star Citizen video game and related marketing materials.

29. Section 2.8.1 of the GLA expressly states that the "splash screen, credits screen, documentation and packaging (if any) as well as the marketing material" shall include "Crytek's copyright notice."

30. Section 2.8.2 of the GLA further states the "splash screen, credits screen, documentation and packaging (if any) as well as the marketing material" shall prominently display both the "Crytek" and "CryEngine" trademarks.

31. Section 2.8.3 of the GLA states that any changes to Crytek's trademarks and copyright notices in these materials requires "Crytek's prior written approval" and a ten day approval period.

32. In accordance with those provisions of the GLA, the Star Citizen video game initially contained a splash screen that included Crytek's trademarks and copyright notices:

33. Defendants knew Crytek's right to display its trademarks and copyright notices in the Star Citizen video game and related marketing materials was a critical component of the GLA. Yet, by at least September 24, 2016, Defendants' co-founder Chris Roberts publicly sought to minimize Crytek's contribution to Star Citizen, stating that "we don't call [the video game engine] CryEngine anymore, we call it Star Engine" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDROliuDczo).

especially since CIG has stood from the hills proclaiming all their cash coming in and tracking it by the hour

lol

Scruffpuff posted:

"I think you'll see, your honor, that CIG in fact didn't develop ANY video games, so we move to dismiss, please. Checkmate legal goonie!"

TheAgent posted:

holy gently caress at them not providing code fixes and improvements back to crytek as part of their agreement

quote:

40. Section 7.3 of the GLA contained a promise that Defendants would provide bug fixes and optimizations to CryEngine on at least an annual basis.

41. Section 7.3 of the GLA states that "[a]nnually during the Game's development period, and again upon publication of the final Game, Licensee shall provide Crytek with any bug fixes, and optimizations made to the CryEngine's original source code files (including CryEngine tools provided by Crytek) as a complete compilable version."

42. On November 16, 2015, Crytek requested long overdue bug fixes and optimizations from Defendants. Defendants did not make a good faith effort to provide Crytek with the promised bug fixes and optimizations to the CryEngine as a complete compilable version.

43. On November 24, 2016, Crytek informed Defendants that they were in breach of Section 7.3 of the GLA. Although Defendants claimed that they were ready and willing to comply with their obligations, they did not comply.

44. On June 22, 2017, Crytek sent another letter to Defendants, again requesting the bug fixes and optimizations that were promised under the GLA. To date, Defendants have not made a good faith effort to provide Crytek with the promised bug fixes and optimizations to the CryEngine as a complete, compilable version.

45. Crytek has been damaged by Defendants' breach of Section 7.3 of the GLA, including for the reason that Defendants have failed to provide the technology to Crytek that they promised to Crytek under the GLA, and Crytek accordingly has not benefited from use of that technology.

this is absolutely huge

like you can't just loving do that

what was roberts loving thinking

this isn't some frivolous lawsuit, this is a massive breach of almost every part of the contract they signed with crytek lol

TheAgent posted:

gently caress me I think this is probably the worst bomb right here

quote:

entering a permanent injunction enjoining and restraining Defendants from continuing to possess or use the Copyrighted Work and a preliminary and permanent injunction requiring Defendants, and all those acting in concert or participation with Defendants, from infringing or encouraging, aiding or abetting others to infringe the Copyrighted Work;

that basically means 'You can't use a single line from our engine, anywhere. Anywhere at all.'

finally time for that full engine rewrite!

VictorianQueerLit posted:

Yeah I know nothing about legal matters but seeing about 40 different clauses of the GLA being breached is a pretty clear indication to even a layman of the scope of this.

"They contractually agreed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here to provide things they did not provide and are unquestionably in breach of contract"

I'm sure the legendary genius visionary Chris Roberts is going to reverse this 40 point takedown in court somehow. He is obviously doing everything completely flawlessly and the dream will be amazing.

UNCUT PHILISTINE posted:

Christmas miracles really do happen

Dusty Lens posted:

We're now at 2:05 in The Hall of the Mountain King.

TheAgent posted:

this also means that the faceware camera might completely be stalled, as the underlying technology was shared with them without CryTeks approval

quote:

On August 26, 2017, news reports announced a partnership between Defendants and a third party developer, Faceware Technologies. Upon information and belief, as a result of the partnership, Faceware received access to the underlying technology for CryEngine (including computer source code). Defendants did not disclose this third party developer's involvement to Crytek, let alone obtain Crytek's prior written approval. This was entirely in breach of the GLA.

lol

Dark Off posted:

VictorianQueerLit posted:

News hit the r/starcitizen discord. Some highlights

quote:

CIG bundles SQ42 and SC into one game pack toss the Crytek logo on the start up screen don't show any behind the scenes screens and pay a few mill and be done with it

quote:

Plus there are probably hundreds of loopholes and "language" in the contracts etc that lawyers will spend 5 years go over and will probablt end up with a small settlement

quote:

Copyright is stupid for coding that way
coding is viewed as an art form, and is only covered verbatim

quote:

We'll make the owner of CryEngine disappear

quote:

amazon will just give CIG money to fight it

Backers haven't decided how they want to spin this yet. They are furiously bouncing between

CryTek just wants Money!
StarEngine isn't CryEngine!
Lumberyard isn't CryEngine!
StarEngine both is and is not Lumberyard which is not CryEngine!
They can just throw logos in and be done with it!
Just starve Crytek out, they will run out of money to sue!
Amazon will save the day!

Sarsapariller posted:

Citizen olympic-level mental gymnastics have begun:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/7jm1xd/rsi_bought_out_the_engine_in_2013/?st=jb5ilrrj&sh=a2953fe6

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/7jly2g/someone_just_proved_cig_is_using_lumberyard_lol/?st=jb5ilus4&sh=f2fa4aea

BeigeJacket posted:

Derek Smart has covered himself in glory.

Sabreseven posted:

tuo posted:

Ortwin will come out as the ultimate inverse-reverse-super-troll.

Crytek: "gently caress, no one wants to license our engine as it's a kinda one-trick-pony, and sucks at multiplayer....we're running out of cash, and can't do anything about it"
Ortwin: "I know this one guy - stupid as a brick - who once made Wing Commander...he still has a big following, and the gerne is kinda dead....they all long for a spacesim MMO"
Crytek: "You can't make an MMO with our engine, it won't work!"
Ortwin: "I know...." *evilgrin* *ortwin buys Crytek shares at min value*

Daztek posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

I thought Clifford was dedicated to the dream. Now I find out he is only in for $52K?

Weak. Pledge harder next time.

Nyast posted:

Well, the pretty funny thing is that they're hosed no matter what the truth is ( assuming Crytek's claims are right ofc ).

If they indeed switched to LY, that was against the terms that said they should use CE exclusively.

If they did not switch, showing the source-code to Faceware was against the terms that said they needed to seek authorization before doing so.

Pick up your poison.

TheAgent posted:

naw, like derek said, this is the first stumble down a long flight of stairs

every hosed over partner, everyone they owe money to, anyone that even thinks they might not get cashed out from roberts n co is going to start coming to collect what's theirs

I'm not overstating when I say this is a huge loving deal

Crazypoops posted:

I just love how royally hosed they are no matter what. They can't say they didn't switch engines because of all of the points they broke, but they can't say they switched either because that is ALSO breaking the contract.

Dogeh posted:

To the newly registered Skadden lawyers dudes who just registered an SA account

HycoCam posted:

CIG is going to claim: Game? What game? All we have is an alpha tech demo at best. There is no game here. SQ42 and Star Citizen is simply market speak for raising money--they are both the same thing! Missing splash screen logos? These are test builds--you don't understand game development.

And as was called long ago--all CIG has done with Lumberyard is change a few calls to work with Amazon servers instead of Google. i.e. CIG never broke the switching engine clause because they never really switched engines.

But I'm only hoping for maximum comedy. And probably the funniest will be the Skadden lawyers figuring out there hasn't been any money for six months plus.

ewe2 posted:

Here's a little song I wrote, you might want to learn it note for note, don't worry be happy

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

[Fetching Legal Documents]

peter gabriel posted:

CryTek: 'So if we win we get everything?'
Lawyer:'yup'
CryTek: 'Assets, rights, all of it?'
Lawer: 'yup, even their web site lol'
CryTek: 'and, and erm, their customers?'
Lawyer: 'yup, their customers, community, all of it'
CryTek: 'commm, community?'
Lawyer: Yes your honour our client would like to drop the case

That DICK! posted:

i just talked to a pretty fancy lawyer and he's not as optimistic about this lawsuit as most. he says sicne the game isn't out and probably won't ever be they basically can't show profits and any money they collect related to the crowdfunding stuff would have to be stipulated in the contract CIG breached. also the permanent injunction only barely maybe stands a chance as it relates to squadron 42 not star citizen because that's all contract breach stuff not copyright infringement stuff

bandaid.friend posted:

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/12/crytek-sues-star-citizen-makers-for-breaching-contract/


Star Citizen is undone due to Face Over IP. Incredible

If this mob was going to fall apart over anything, it'd be the most extravagant and useless feature-promise they never actually included in the game

alphabettitouretti posted:

Yeah they're turbofucked. The very best case is this is without merit and thrown out the moment it gets in front of a judge, and there's no other 100% guaranteed legal action coming their way (lol).

Even then it will have (or has?) done so much damage to their already terrible reputation they'll never recover. It'll be that much harder to hire staff, and the backers they rely on will lose confidence. They aren't a normal company with a viable product and steady income, they're operating on presales in the hope of actually finishing something one day and it being a huge success.

Star citizen is a big joke and is going to go down in infamy. Crobbers legacy is going to be overseeing one of the biggest disasters in gaming history.

peter gabriel posted:

No, there is no other road than 100% comedy here.
Take for example the best case scenario for backers - CIG wins, Crytek are defeated and Star Citizen releases.
Every. single. time. a backer loads the game up, there will be a Crytek logo there and every time the backer will feel impotent rage. Each session in the 'Universe will begin with a feeling of resentment.

Beet Wagon posted:

Hey remember when we were all like "haha lol the only devs they have are brand new FullSail grads" and reddit was like "Nuh uh they're all experts"




welp

quote:

Sunswipe posted:

It's kinda funny how CIG will be in full crisis management mode over something and Ben's Twitter just has something like "They're not printing any Star Trek books this month. "

https://twitter.com/banditloaf/status/941181202106478592

226 posted:

Don't worry guys Crytek is just about bankrupt anyway...

reddit posted:

If Cryteks employee count truly is over 550, that money would have been burned through quickly, especially given how bad their leadership seems to be.

mjotto posted:

If CryTek would go bankrupt, he could have continued to use his custom CE code without having to pay for it. That's probably why he didn't pay them, just waiting for them to fall over and having an engine for free. When Amazon saved CryTek, Chris knew he was hosed and had to pay CryTek. By switching to Lumberyard, he tried to avoid those costs. Probably.

Dusty Lens posted:

Monathin posted:

I really, honestly, 100% doubt there's going to be a settling out of court. As multiple people who know better than me covered, you don't go to Skadden if you're planning to just 'settle out of court'. These guys don't get out of bed for anything but blood in the water. And I feel like CIG couldn't actually settle with what they have on tap, nor would they - it seems entirely CIG to try and fight this out without realizing how horrifically outmatched in the legal department they currently are.

Man when you put it that way it sounds like CIG's legal defense is Toast.

Gramps posted:

I can't fathom that any Shitizen would think that Crytek hired Skadden for a quick 100k or so. 1/4th of the team that peeled a half billion off of oculus is going to do similar work for less than a thousandth the payday? Not fuckin likely, bucko. Each lawyer on that team is going to pocket 7 figures minimum. I really do feel bad for the people who just wanted to play a fun cool game, but goddamn man. From an observer's perspective this whole endeavor seemed like a kid who won a paper airplane contest in middleschool decided to crowdfund a mission to proxima centauri. Actually that's a bit generous as I think the average bright middle school kid probably has better organizational skills than the Crobbler

AP posted:

This goes to the heart of what has happened to all the money in my view.

Chris Roberts couldn't have built the demo without Crytek, on kickstarter launch day CIG's (subcontractor, built) website crashed, so CIG switched subcontractors to Turbulent. This is a pattern that repeats, there are so many ex-subcontractors, Turbulent are understandably a lot harder to ditch now than normal.

Turbulent - Web platform, Spectrum, store, sales - Montreal, Canada

Behaviour Interactive - Concept art, Ships, 890 Jump, x85, mobiGlas, hangar flair - Montreal, Canada

CGBot - Artwork - Mexico Probable source of the leak from 2013

IllFonic - FPS module/1st unfinished version of Star Marine - Denver

Moon Collider - Kythera Artificial Intelligence middleware - Scotland

Rmory - weapon concept art - Bavaria, Germany

The Imaginarium - 63+ day Failed motion capture shoot - London

Wyrmbyte - Network engineering, Universe, Servers - Louisville Colorado

Virtuos - Ships, 1st version of the Cutlass, props - Shanghai, China

RedHotCG - props - Shanghai, China

voidALPHA - environment & concept art - Emeryville, California

Not even sure this covers all the ones we know about (faceware, Side for casting etc), never mind the ones that were never made public. Now consider that Chris Roberts doesn't seem able to do much himself, so he hires people, after a while the relationship normally ends. It now appears, the relationship sometimes ends very badly

ComfyPants posted:

Crobby! We gotta go back! Back to before the "engine switch!" Something's gotta be done about your lawsuits!

Virtual Captain posted:

StarCitizen Tracker Guy: Great drama Derek, any idea how long CryTek has been in contact with Skadden over this?
thedereksmart: almost a year. they were doing their homework. I have been talking about this in my secure channel all year long. then I started hinting at "wait until they see what comes next" when I knew this lawsuit was close. Then it hit. Of course I broke the news because I was aware of it the minute it was filed.
StarCitizen Tracker Guy: wew
StarCitizen Tracker Guy: One thing I don't get is why CryTek waited till CIG had no money left (allegedly)
thedereksmart: because they have no idea about the money. now they will.

D_Smart posted:

FYI, today was just the tip of the iceberg.

What comes next, and which I've also been sitting on for months, is bigger than this CryTek lawsuit, and even more hilarious.

pokie posted:

What is this supposed to illustrate?

ewe2 posted:

Here's a little song I wrote, you might want to learn it note for note, don't worry be happy



(I will be recording a new parody tonight hopefully when it's a bit cooler. It is very relevant right now)

Derek Smart was right.

Tokamak posted:

CIG forked CryEngine 3.7 and modified it by over 50%.
Amazon forked CryEngine 3.8 and modified it by over 50%.
CIG rebased their branch onto Amazon's branch of CryEngine.
Miraculously this took 'a couple' of developers, 'a couple' of days.
Of course this is how code works.
Welcome to Star Citizen.

The_Groove posted:

juggalo baby coffin posted:

did anyone make a joke about going from face over ip to case over ip?

more like hand over IP

Jobbo_Fett posted:

TheAgent posted:

quote:

I liked the games that Erin Roberts produced and always held out this idea that he was a good candidate for making Sq42 and somehow a beacon of sanity.

Will you tell us all the ghost stories and reasons why that isn't so?

Here's the hilarious breakdown of Erin Roberts:

Fucks off from Tt fusion to join up with his brother Chris Roberts, killing most of the company by poaching any single loving person that would go with him
Before that works at Tt fusion making some parts of Lego games
Tt fusion is actually just a renamed company called Embryonic Studios Limited
Embryonic Studios Limited is actually just Warthog Games (same people heading it, including the much lovely named Derek Senior)
Warthog Games is basically just Gizmondo Europe

if you don't know what the gizmondo is

well

quote:

The Gizmondo was further overshadowed when Swedish press revealed criminal pasts of several executives, causing their resignations including Tiger CEO Carl Freer. Director of Gizmondo Europe Stefan Eriksson was involved in a Swedish criminal organisation, the "Uppsalamaffian" (the Uppsala mafia). By February 2006, the company was forced into bankruptcy after amassing US$300 million debt, and the Gizmondo stopped production. Weeks thereafter Eriksson crashed a rare Ferrari Enzo driving at 162 mph in California, and was later jailed for the crash and his criminal offenses.

like how anyone could look at Erin and think "golly gee, the guy who helped scam 100s of millions from investors can sure produce a game" just lol

D_Smart posted:

I expect that I'm going to be busy with interviews, streams, my Star Citizen book (talking to Amazon Publishing and others) etc.

Toops posted:

At my current company, every single programming language, library, package, etc has to be cleared with legal. This is a Java shop, with a Node-based front-end, so... that's a lot. Every class file has to have an up-to-date copyright header. I leave comments in code reviews all the time to the tune of "please update the copyright header." Now, the punk-rear end "gently caress yeah!" skateboarder rebel in me is like "jesus christ this corporate poo poo is a stupid waste of time," but the professional adult knows that when you screw this kind of thing up, you put your company and everyone that works there at risk.

My hot take, CIG thinks of themselves as this plucky hotshot hacker kid with business savvy that's going to "disrupt" the big pub stranglehold like Uber or some poo poo. Well Chris, welcome to Earf. You're not very important, you're not very smart, and you have hosed up far too hard for far too long. Hold on to your butt.

kw0134 posted:

Amazon has no dog in this fight. It could arise that someone at Amazon induced a breach of contract, but that should be unimaginably stupid that in this saga where there's always more and it's even dumber then you could have imagined, I draw the line there.

Even if all the stupid fell out of CIG's head and landed in a puddle at Amazon's feet, the damages likely won't amount to too much as it's not like Amazon's made a lot of money off Lumberyard. There's no unjust enrichment by Amazon, they don't seem to have diverted profit that would have gone to Crytek but for their theoretical interference.

Crytek is going for the jugular. Amazon didn't get to where they are by jumping in between a pitbull and one of the millions of vendors that happen to be using their platform. Indeed, it's more likely they'll shove CIG in front as an ablative meat shield if it came to it.

SomethingJones posted:

Skadden and Crytek have just gone all in with a two-pair and a Queen and we haven't even seen the flop yet. Ortwin and Chris are sitting across the table with a sheet of paper with the WingDings font printed out on it.

SomethingJones posted:

Star Citizen: Around the Verse
Dec 14 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Piy-ibiq1M&t=1032s

Clive Johnson (Lead Network Programmer):
Last week we've been fixing issues, em, probably most notably there was a bug were if the server had been running for about 6 hours the PHYSICS TIME WOULD START GOING BACKWARDS

One of our network guys spotted the issue, put a fix in, and now time always goes forwards... which is good to know

Drunk Theory posted:

So that's why development has only started yesterday. loving time has been running backwards.

Virtual Captain posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Piy-ibiq1M&t=2614s
"Chris really wants it that you can basically hit aerodynamic limits [...] and I think that's what Chris would wants us to get towards. It's quite complicated to try and work out where those forces are because we don't have like a full on fluid simulation that you would have in like [a] professional flight simulator"

The Titanic posted:

Nobody will ever ask “so uh... why didn’t you just adhere to your written contractual agreements?” Because that’s simply absurd!

I think it’s glorious that Chris Roberts’ lack of ability to estimate project lengths is really what has killed him here. This project wasn’t supposed to last this long, and he screwed it up.

I want to picture him lording over an ungodly jira backlog, shouting at it and waving his hands, “why can’t I loving estimate you right!!!” As he has “Redefine Internet Communication” with 6 story points. “Human Like AI” with 4 story points. And one “Build Game” thing that has 10.

According to loving jira it’s already done!!! Ggrrarr!!!

The way CR designs games is similar to that picture of a really complex drawing that has two frames of “use a few basic shapes to get your bearings” and then the second picture is the complete version with “finish the loving drawing”.

Here is one of them. This is the Chris Roberts development method. There’s no connection between the start and the end, poo poo just loving Magic’s itself together and presto you done redefined and saved PC gaming!

The Titanic posted:

https://twitter.com/_icze4r/status/941573008229126144
(tweet: I'm looking at Star Citizen again and breathing in and out of a paper bag to calm down *image of $13,000 expresso installation*)

I always love when somebody says “I just know those dirty goons and Derek are lying... I’m going to just do a little tiny bit of research here to prove them wrong and- oh my loving god.”

hot balls man no homo posted:

RSI Site posted:

The team will continue looking into performance aspects, so that we can ship the initial version of 3.0 without disastrous client performance.

Client now runs better than disastrous. It is slightly better than a catastrophe but still not good enough to be considered a clusterfuck. Catastrophuck stage if you will

AbstractNapper posted:

Promises!
- No publishers.
- The crowdfunded money are way better utilized
- Shorter development time
- No focus on bogus demos for big gaming conferences
- Delivery on (2) games within 2-3 years, otherwise things become stale

Reality:
- partnerships with (at the least) Amazon, Intel, AMD, and arguably Crytek who provided additional funds. Signed contracts have started to backfire.
- Development hell, investments on 3rd parties that were commissioned to do work were thrown to the fire pit, numerous companies started all around the world for no apparent reason. Backers are expected to keep funding at a regular basis to get "the better experience possible".
- Five to six years in development, still in pre-alpha, non-existent gameplay loop.
- Plenty of bogus demos, unrelated to whatever turds they actually "release". Marketing tactics that are way past borderline sleazy.
- Backers get to play the broken pre-alpha demo, which is laggy, buggy, crashy and choppy as hell and on top of that they are segmented in tiers of Avocados, Subscribers and plebs who still don't get to play the 3.0 pre-alpha. Feature creep is out of control.

This is all good for Star Citizen because at least CIG tries, Crobblz is a genious and, most importantly, DREAMS.

reverend crabhands posted:

- Coutts did their due diligence, Coutts was aware when they handed over the dosh for Sq42 rights
- But SQ42 is essentially running on an unlicensed engine, Coutts knew this, CIG knew this
- Crytek threatening SQ42 maybe have been "encouraged" by Coutts
- Coutts now take SC ownership since that was the collateral offered and CIG took the loan under false pretences
- Crytek, due to previously signed deal, force CIG to back SC out of Lumberyard
- Ben Parry has to draw a new diagram to show how easy this is
- SC drags on whales being milked for eternity

?

Phi230 posted:

I pray that this goes to trial because that is the funniest option

I Greyhound posted:

I've been involved in a few patent and civil liability suits, and those rarely go to trial, but they do often involve a lot of discovery and depositions and reports before they settle. A lot of the time, the two sides consider it worth going through those initial expenses to size up their chances, and also to try to get a better settlement, so it's not uncommon for settlements to be reached the day before the start of the full trial.

EminusSleepus posted:

All this talk about "discovery" can someone enlighten me? Is it a new ship?

XK posted:

I just saw the argument that CIG can settle by giving CryTek a portion of sales of only the game packages. All the ship sales are separate, so they don't have to give any of that money. Therefore it will only be a few million.

Dusty Lens posted:

Crytek: Hello your client broke the contract.

CIG lawyers who also worked at Crytek which is fun: Yes that is correct.

Crytek: We want X money or we go to trial. Do you want trial?

CIG lawyers: We do not want trial. No one wants trial. Trials are expensive and everyone loses money.

Crytek: Ok yes, give us money.

CIG lawyers: Ok here is money/we do not have money take something else which you can turn into money.

Probably going to go something like that. Like 90% of civil cases that never go further than a tastefully decorated office in a nice building somewhere in LA.

D_Smart posted:

Right now, the plan is for hardcover, paperback and Kindle. So anyone buying and send me their copy in a self-addressed return mailer, will get it signed.

And I don't care how many pages it takes, all Goons actively involved in this drama since The July Blog, will be listed individually. I am still waiting on legal to let me know if I can in fact use the memes which have become part of the drama culture. Though they are in public domain, the ones I use, I may just need a waiver from the creators. But I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

I am also considering doing an audio book of all the blogs, and all the key articles I have written. Just need to figure out if I am going to narrate it, of have a voice actor do it; since I know several who have worked with me on games over the years.

peter gabriel posted:

I don't care about the law stuff, it'll get funny on its own.

What is currently tickling me is:

CryTek made the entirety of the Kickstarter stuff that backers swooned over
Backers now hate CryTek
By extension they hate Star Citizen

kw0134 posted:

Every insider should have seen this suit coming. These aren't obscure clauses like the infamous "bowl of M&Ms without any brown ones," these would go to the very heart of why there's a commercial relationship between the two parties. And at least on the allegations, everyone's seen that CIG has very loudly advertised what in retrospect is rather damning evidence. We're not testing the limits of IP law or needing to go on fishing expeditions through the parties' paper trail, Crytek is alleging that anyone with a pair of eyes would be seeing enormous breaches of the contract, things that are still happening to this day with the latest release of Bugsmashers.

CIG, given some rope, crafted an elaborate noose with flashing LED lights and a pyre to burn the entire gallows in a fantastic display of light and sound. It's legal self immolation on a ridiculous level.

reddit posted:

I've probably put maybe 15-20 hrs into 3.0 and filed dozens of issues. I've never actually completed a mission. Not one. Comedy of errors:
- Pick up cargo, get the glitch where it attaches to my hand, cannot place it
- Pick up a black box, it is bugged and cannot pick up
- Pick up cargo correctly, unable to place it anywhere on my Connie
- Connie ladder of death
- Try and zero G out of my Titan cockpit, get glitched and am unable to EVA anywhere
- Finally pick up cargo, place it, game crashes
- Finally pick up cargo, place it, mission never updates
- Try and find missing crew, mission just ends while I am roaming the wreckage
- EVA into my Titan with cargo, glitch and die
- EVA into my Cutlass with cargo, glitch and die
- EVA out of my Titan, grab cargo, return to Titan to see it doing the fun pre 3.0 spin of death
- Grab cargo, EVA back into my Cutlass, place it, doorway to cockpit won't open

Never mind the undestroyable pirates. I just spent 20 min dogfighting a cutlass only to have it finally just disappear. I know it's alpha, I am just wondering if others suffer the same degree of fail.

quote:

Star Citizen is the used-car dealership of video games. The perpetually delayed MMO still has no release date in sight, but the online store is doing gangbusters! In it the suckers players can purchase dozens of ships, ranging from $20 to $3,000. Maybe they'll even get to play the game someday!

Lechtansi posted:

My favorite thing thats happened in the last few days is that when the Shitizens quote CIGs response to crytek, they've edited out the infringing part.

“We are aware of the Crytek complaint having been filed in the US District Court. CIG hasn’t used the CryEngine for quite some time since we switched to Amazon’s Lumberyard. This is a meritless lawsuit that we will defend vigorously against, including recovering from Crytek any costs incurred in this matter.”

becomes

“We are aware of the Crytek complaint having been filed in the US District Court. This is a meritless lawsuit that we will defend vigorously against, including recovering from Crytek any costs incurred in this matter.”

Because thats totally how the law works.

Loxbourne posted:

In his hour of triumph, I'd like to devote an effortpost to Derek Smart himself. A dangerous past-time, perhaps, but an important question to ask. I'm here for the laughs like most of the thread but I also want to see CIG pulled apart and picked over. I want to read Coutts' debtor reports, see the forensic accountants go over the books, get as many backers out as are willing to be saved. Taking CIG apart properly means doing ballistic analysis of the huge great burning trail blasted through it by one man.

So who IS that masked warlord? More to the point, why did one guy with a twitter account end up a furious lightning-rod for the hatred of hundreds of backers, single-handedly attracting the ire of a massive community that should (and once did) have had more than enough to amuse itself with throughout Star Citizen's development.

It's been pointed out, more than once, that there wouldn't be a cult without Derek. That the existence of an active hate figure to strive against was what was needed to push a mildly toxic fandom into a full-blown horror where people compete to throw all their worldly goods as fast as possible into the gaping maw of CIG. I don't actually agree with this sentiment. For one thing the fandom was toxic from the start, but I think even without Derek we'd still see a cult of some form. The cult is a side-effect of CIG's marketing techniques. They needed to milk their whales, to find people who will spend large sums of money and keep spending those sums without complaint as the game gets delayed again and again. That's not to say Derek hasn't left a massive mark on Star Citizen, of course. But he stepped into a role that was ready and waiting. If Derek did not exist it would have been necessary for the Citizens to create him.

I'm going to adopt some terminology here because it's crucial we (as obviously disinterested goons of Science ) keep two concepts separate. One of them is Derek Smart, human being with a twitter account. The other is THE SMART. Great Beast Who Is Called Warlord. Avatar of Big Publishing. The terrible being with eyes of fire and tongues of flame who rose from Internet Hell to destroy Dreams, who travels in a shrieking cloud of circling bats accompanied by the wails of the goons and dramatic choirs chanting in Latin.

That entity doesn't exist anywhere outside the Citizens' collective nightmares (and this thread's half-serious injokes), but it was already there long before Derek typed his first blog. He just put a name and a face to it. THE SMART is, of course, the personification of backer nervousness. Their fear the game genuinely is impossible to make, that Chris is overpromising, that the funding won't hold up. The entirely rational fears it is quite normal to hold even if one has plenty of faith in the project. It might not work out, and if it doesn't...well, there goes their dream and their money too. A lot of their money. Life-changing, farm-mortgaging, marriage-ending amounts.

I'd bet that same money that the first thing many citizens said to themselves when Derek first crossed their radar was "Of course...". Of course there would be an Anti-Crobbler. Of course someone would rise to fight the glorious promise of Star Citizen. Of course there would be someone that evil, that diabolical, that beholden to dark powers, to try and take away their Dreams. He fits the worldview of a frustrated, aging nerd all too well. The reason I don't have nice things is because The Man keeps me down, and here he is right now tryin' to stop this Glorious Thing.

The real dark whisper of THE SMART (choirs) is that Star Citizen is never coming out. Your money has bought you nothing except a terrible tech demo and Chris's instagram gallery. You're not Han Solo, Captain Kirk, OR Mal Reynolds, you're still whoever you were before you bought your first ship.

That's bad. For some citizens - the saddest ones, the ones most in need of help - that's terrible. Hateful. Evil. It's also tremendously painful.

But it's also an entirely natural thing to think, just with basic human critical faculties. The ones CIG and one's fellow cultists spend so much time and energy suppressing. Cultists aren't (all) dumb, they're just caught in a system designed to switch their critical thinking off.

So THE SMART (choirs)'s real purpose, his real utility in the minds of Citizens, is as something to sublimate their misgivings onto. When CIG rides high, the Citizens are dismissive. When CIG hits trouble, they go fight Derek. When the crazier backers disappear from the fandom during a marketing fuckup, some of them go off and spout hate at Derek for a bit thinking that this would drive back THE SMART and make Star Citizen good again. I've talked about how Elite and Line of Defence are where the citizens project problems with the game; Derek is where they put their problems with themselves. A classic scapegoat. When a Citizen triumphs against Derek, he triumphs against the part of his brain that is saying "hold on, why are we spending so much cash here?"

Now, the man behind the mask didn't have to be Derek Smart. It was well on the way to being Beer4thebeergod for a while. The role would have fit any charismatic backer who pulled out early or any outsider who spoke out too loudly. David Braben would have fit (he's basically the current understudy). If nobody stepped forward to take the role, sooner or later it would have been Big Publishing or someone like Bobby Kotick. The cult would be much the same externally, spite pledges and all.

Derek proved an excellent candidate for the mantle. It requires a certain level of independence and thick skin just to sustain the requirements of the post. Someone with a day job would be at risk from being harassed so hard they actually stopped warlording (witness the Escapist and their poor journalist who was just too early). Derek has time and an independent income and a very thick skin indeed; he's pretty much immune to any weapon in the backer arsenal and that makes him a perfect Dark Lord.

Derek also knows his lines. He can sneer, he can mock, he fits the role of playground bully and he can be baited. He spouts heresies (leaks! ex-CIG employees saying nasty things!), he attracts followers (goons!), he plays the role of a cartoon villain excellently. Citizens naturally want to fight him to exorcise the cognitive dissonance, and as it happens Derek's up for the fight. The key is to remember that the Citizens already wanted someone to fight. They wanted to go find someone to dump their fears onto and vent their anger at. Derek was in the right place at the wrong time.

He doesn't fight fair though. He doesn't meet them on the field at dawn wearing black armour and carrying a sword of crying souls, then battle them for a day and night under a burning sky. Or at least he doesn't stop tweeting when a Citizen sends him what all his fellow Citizens assure him are SICK OWNS. The Citizenry resent that (then tell themselves that it's just proof of his treachery). The SMART role (choirs) includes striving to defeat CIG and all their works - but it doesn't include actually undermining CIG and their works or making the citizens ask themselves awkward existential questions. That's when they really, really loathe him.

And so Derek Smart the person is given an absurd level of power by citizens, elevated into a dark figure whose very existence harms Star Citizen...while at the same time, that harm is used to explain why Star Citizen isn't living up to their dreams yet. The Man, keeping them down. Remember, the key to the spite pledge is that proving THE SMART (choirs) wrong makes Star Citizen itself better. Because it makes the voices in the individual backers' heads shut up.

Of course THE SMART cannot be truly defeated until the Great Day of Release when Chris descends from Heaven etc etc - which is to say, it would come on the day Chris finally disproves the backers' misgivings by releasing the game - but surely He should have been forced into retreat by the same arguments the citizens use to reassure each other. That apocalyptic rhetoric was telling.

Now the game is facing an actual apocalypse we're not seeing any of this cartoon stuff anymore . We're seeing resentment and rage and threats of Internet Violence. Attempts to claim power over the situation with weird legal terminology and "affidavits". In other words, the standard reactions of obsessed, angry nerds when their worldview starts to falter. This is no longer a situation THE SMART (choirs) can help backers mentally come to terms with. It'll be interesting to see if they try to build a new one to encompass Skadden and Crytek.

If Derek really wanted the Citizens to love him forever, all he needs to do is don spiky black armour, wear a skull mask, then ride into CIG HQ by shattering the Space Door and carry off Sandi on a dark steed with glowing eyes. Citizens would pledge their entire worldly goods on the spot to form a Space Posse to go after him. If he then finished the storyline in their heads and shook his fist in defiance from the bridge of an exploding skull-faced Vanduul supercarrier (no doubt begging his dark EA masters for mercy as the ship burned around him), then he'd claim a world record for the most human beings simultaneously brought to orgasm in a 24-hour period and could single-handedly fund Star Citizen's development until 2025. Choirs.

Annoyingly however the Derek Smart who actually exists doesn't live in that world. He is a flawed Internet Satan. He lives over in reality, where the average citizen is that 43-year-old wages clerk in Idaho. He may be a single-minded old cuss who sustains himself on the rage of others (and he appears to be just fine with that), but his greatest sin is not playing along. Not actually being a proper scapegoat. Derek might actually win, and that's not in the Great Book of Crobblers at all.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

I love the "I'm not in a cult, YOU'RE in a cult!" response. It's the perfect amalgamation of self delusion, sunk cost fallacy, and deflection.

peter gabriel posted:

Is there anything funnier than CIG being sued by CryTek for not fixing bugs in a timely manner?
Yes - CIG ran a series of videos called Bugsmashers throughout the entire time period in question

Scruffpuff posted:

Chalks posted:

CIG made a big fuss about their ground breaking hologram technology where they could create holograms of other game characters, claiming it had never been done before. As you can see from that footage, all they've really done is put a lovely hologram shader over the top half of a character model and clipped it half way through a table. Unfortunately they also failed to make it stop casting shadows so you see a full shadow of the entire model the whole time.

This it the thing about Chris, and CIG, that just blows me away every time. He literally reinvents the wheel every goddamed time. "Well our first "rotational transport facilitator" was a triangle, but it was kinda bumpy, but we iterated on the design and now we're on "rotational transport facilitator 2.0" which is an octagon. We've learned that the more sides it has, the smoother the sides, and less disruptive the "roll". Thanks for staying patient with us as we are developing technologies that have never been seen before."

G0RF posted:

AP posted:

Relay Station | ANNIVERSARY MADNESS 1 year OMG!

Oh hell what a sight! Erris — just sitting there like a child in his Star Wars jammies and being told “Santa Claus is a lie - you think a fat guy is really sliding down billions of chimneys in a single night, delivering gifts to good little boys and girls? Really kid?”

Watching him try to handwave IP rights away as utterly inconsequential because IT’S THE PEOPLE WHO COME UP WITH THE IDEAS WHO REALLY MATTER is like a flustered child pushing back with, “... Santa has a magic sleigh that’s REALLY FAST and LITTLE ELVES that work for him and when he can’t fit down a chimney he sends them down or uses some other CHRISTMAS MAGIC to make it happen! You gotta believe!”

Here’s a 90 second summary of the world we actually live in, Erris.

Erris, you’re a grown man. Take off your Star Wars jammies and join us in the grown-up world. You’ve put it off long enough, man, it’s time. You can be an adult and still have childlike wonder, man — the world is full of moments of beauty, truth and goodness that can make even a cynic tear-up at the sight. But Star Citizen can not and will not be the machine that delivers them to you. You cling desperately to the promises of a man you know to be dishonest — brazenly deceitful yet you take consolation in the hope that he’s only delusional. But you know what kind of lunatic puts his trust in delusional men? A delusional man.

”Search your feelings, Erris... you know this be true.”

alf_pogs posted:

Ben on reddit posted:

Why is Star Citizen being split from Squadron 42?
Hello! The split is just for future purchases - they're separate games, so they'll be sold separately in the future. It doesn't impact any existing backers, who already have both in their packages. Basically, current backers got in early and got two games for the price of one. Folks in the future aren't as lucky. (As it should be... it was the early support from our original backers who made the game possible in the first place!)

every word these incompetent buffoons have spouted will help tighten the judicial noose

its kind of amazing. beautiful in a way

ewe2 posted:

Thank you all for a better than expected year. It's ending with a bang, and you can't ask for more. So in the spirit of the season, I give you:



lyrics

Virtual Captain posted:

fools coke

Alan Smithee posted:

lol fools coke

isn't that just crack

PederP posted:

I think the Coutts loan is a trivial detail in this story, and got blown out of proportion because some of the paperwork was public. Having to put up everything as collateral is a completely normal way to get a good deal on interest. Collateral and credit do not need to match in value, and in fact rarely do.

Golli posted:

Amazon has an article linked on their AWS | Lumberyard page that includes quotes from Carl Jones talking about the switch.
https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

Carl Jones Interview posted:

Since you adopted CryEngine 3 before the free-license change, did the move to Lumberyard and its royalty free model, mean it was a cost saving for Cloud Imperium?
Well you can’t get better value than free, of course! In the future, it means we will be able to do a lot more for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 without being concerned about the cost of licensing technology, which is no bad thing, but it doesn’t make a huge difference for us economically, in the short term.
Was the decision to move to Lumberyard at all based on the financial difficulties faced by Crytek?
We certainly wanted a technology partner that could support us and be with us for the long term, investing in tools and technology year after year, which Amazon of course can uniquely deliver. But mostly we liked Amazon’s strategy for gaming, specifically with Lumberyard, Twitch and AWS. We knew that over time Amazon would create the best game engine and support technologies to enable and power online games using AWS – it’s inevitable and will be a big help to us and our community, now and in the future. We’re always looking long term at CIG, and with Amazon as a partner, we’re able to feel confident about the future.

Natron posted:

I just wanted to chime in with a quick effort post about something I keep hearing the dedicated citizens say. They keep claiming that the timing of this lawsuit is suspect and that Crytek is only doing this because they're out of money/failed/bad dudes.

I have a lot of experience creating and administering contracts both large and small. In a previous life I used to create large contracts as an architect for very complex renovation projects, and now I make small contracts as a service provider to architects and other designers, so I've been on both sides of these contracts. These are slightly different than a contract that a game studio and engine holder would enter into, but the tools and intents are the same.

The timing of the lawsuit is in no way suspect to me. Contracts are tools that provide two things(among others): a codified agreement between two parties, and a tool to navigate this agreement and make sure the other side is honest. It protects both parties, and gives both parties recourse in case the other party does something that isn't in the agreement or is against it. During the course of a complex project, you'll encounter many small instances where one side or the other will test the contract. These are like little micr-breaches of the agreement. It's usually just something small that happens during the course of a project that neither side anticipated, or one side didn't realize was actually a part of the contract at all. When these things happen, the side that believes it has been wrong just reaches out to the other side, and what usually happens is a dialogue where both sides make their point and agree to either amend the agreement to add in for this unforseen circumstance, or the side that didn't realize they were out of line must come back in line or offer some kind of recompense for their micro-breach. This is all usually done by the two parties and is almost always quite amicable.

A contract can be a kind of living document, so these changes are somewhat expected over the course of a long project, and sometimes these changes take time to make. The point of having a contract is to spell out exactly what you think should happen between two or more parties, so that no one needs to go to court. Sometimes, when one side does something that isn't allowed, it takes along time for the other side to notice, and the side that has been wronged doesn't immediately start making threats, they just open a dialogue instead. This negotiation can take quite a while and if the other party is loving up other parts of the contract while this negotiation is happening, it can complicate things quite badly and cause bad feelings on either side.

The main thing to realize is that all of this takes a lot of time. If you've ever been a freelance and had to chase someone down to get a cheque or to sign off on a final version of something, you know how this goes. You phone, they stop answering. You e-mail, they don't reply. I have a "payment due upon receipt" line in all of my contracts as well as on all of my invoices. I'd say I'm lucky in getting around 25% of those cheques within two weeks, even though we both agreed. You don't get lawyers involved immediately because going to court is expensive as gently caress for both parties, causes a lot of stress, and will almost always kill your business relationship with your client.

These breaches that Crytek is complaining about took place a long time ago, and they didn't want to go to a trial because they wanted to salvage what they could in their agreement. Going to court isn't something to take lightly, and is only done when all the bridges are pretty much burnt already. The reason this took so long is because it takes a long time to finally lose hope that the person or company you're dealing with is going to do the right thing as per the contract.

G0RF posted:

Note to the CIG Intern reading this thread for objectionable material for senior management: Do you really think Chris and Sandi need more crap to worry about right now? The dissent you’ve been long tasked with monitoring and cataloging has gone viral. It didn’t all originate here, or with Derek, it emerges naturally for reasonable minds paying passing attention to the non-stop marathons of self-owns, unforced errors, overpromises and undeliveries and uninterrupted lying that “filters from the top” of CIG. The true enemy of this project was within all along. They sent you here. So it really might be time to polish up that CV, file your honest Glassdoor take, and bounce to a better job at a company not in terminal decay spiral induced by moral turpitude and gross incompetence. You deserve better!

Latin Pheonix posted:

We don't have the GLA, nor do we know what communication took place between CIG and Crytek. What we can assume, however, is that:
1. Skadden are reasonably competent, given that they're considered a top international law firm; and
2. Skadden have pored through the GLA, any amendments and any communications between CIG/Crytek and felt that, on the facts discovered, they could make the five claims I'll talk about.

Because of these assumptions, I'm going to make some further assumptions of fact:
1. CIG/RSI had an agreement (GLA), and all the clauses mentioned in the complaint were in that agreement;
2. The agreement was never ended, either by a break clause exercised by CIG/RSI/Crytek, nor by mutual agreement; and
3. There were no automatic triggers in the GLA that ended the agreement (time limits, events, etc.).

With that in mind, let's get to the meat of the subject; Crytek's claims against CIG/RSI.

-----

Claim 1: CIG/RSI are developing a second game without a license from Crytek.
This one is one of the simpler ones to confirm; we know for a fact that Squadron 42 was never a separate game from Star Citizen, this can be seen in the Kickstarter, where Squadron 42 is listed as the 'singleplayer component' of Star Citizen (i.e. it was just a game mode in a single game). Following the initial pitch of a single game, it was only later that CIG decided to split Star Citizen into two independent, separately playable, packages (note how Squadron 42 does not require Star Citizen to play). This split is where Star Citizen became two games, and the point where CIG appears to have breached its contract with Crytek.

Claim 2: CIG agreed to market Cryengine, including keeping its logo on splash screens, showing the trademark on the website, etc.
Honestly, this is a no-brainer, there's very little to dispute here; we know that CIG very likely breached this because there's tons of very public changes to the CIG website, launcher, splash screen, etc. where Cryengine/Crytek's logos were removed and Lumberyard replaced them. In fact, it was so noticable that the commandos shat a brick when it first appeared around this time last year with no announcement.

Claim 3: CIG agreed to develop Star Citizen exclusively on Cryengine.
Again, this is something so well documented and lauded that there is little more to add here. The backers have tried pointing out that it Lumberyard is based on Cryengine which they say muddies the legal waters, but the fact is that CIG had no permission to use another engine to develop Star Citizen. What the basis of these engines are is irrelevant, the clause would have been breached the moment they announced the change, started plastering Lumberyard logos everywhere and using Lumberyard's tools.

Claim 4: CIG agreed to send bug updates/improvements to Crytek.
There are two factors to consider here; the first being that Crytek claims that CIG did send some updates/improvements in 2015 but that they were insufficient and not in good faith, while the second factor is that Crytek claims that CIG did not send any updates/improvements for 2016-2017. On the first factor, there will likely be some contention by CIG regarding whether what was sent in 2015 was in good faith or not. This likely means that there will be some expert opinion on what CIG sent to Crytek in 2015 and whether it is enough to satisfy CIG's obligations to Crytek in this clause.

The second factor, however, would be much more clear-cut if true; if CIG did not send any updates/improvements over the last two years, then it's almost certain that this would be seen as a breach of their contractual obligations.

Claim 5: CIG breached Crytek's copyright by chowing Cryengine's code on Bugsmashers and third parties.
Ok, this one is outside my comfort zone, but I suspect it will be down to legal and expert opinion in this case. The main issue at hand is 'how much exposure of code in Bugsmashers is enough to constitute a breach?'. This is something that would require some degree of expertise in US copyright law (which I don't have since I trained in the UK) so I can't really answer this and would also likely require expert testimony in the form of a game developer. In addition, whether or not CIG was sharing code with Faceware is something that could only be determined by seeing what evidence Crytek has to show this. Do note, though, that Skadden wouldn't flippantly make such claims without some drat good evidence/legal knowledge to back them up.

-----

Essentially, contract-wise, CIG would only come out of this unscathed if there was a break clause in the GLA that they exercised before claims 1-4 took place or if they otherwise mutually agreed with Crytek to do the same. Such a clause or agreement would be so obvious and such a basic thing to miss by Skadden that I cannot accept that this is the case here. CIG's response to the lawsuit (where they essentially agreed they breached claim 3) also displays an alarming(ly hilarious) degree of ignorance about the claims levelled against them.

Overall, this complaint makes a lot of things in CIG's past add up; the sudden change to Lumberyard makes sense if you consider that CIG was chained to an agreement with Crytek but saw an opportunity when Crytek suffered financial woes. My guess is that CIG couldn't get Cryengine to work for SC, saw Lumberyard and figured it would be easier to work with and then jumped ship, assuming that Crytek would simply disappear and no-one would pick up the contract and pursue them afterwards (or, alternatively, Chris didn't know that might happen or didn't care). The split of Squadron 42 may have been particularly scummy as it may have been CIG trying to stiff Crytek out of royalties for sales when it knew that Crytek would be unable to dispute their action (this is all just speculation, though).

tl;dr: CIG tried to gently caress over Crytek, thinking Crytek would go bust, and it came screaming back to bite them in the rear end.

DapperDon posted:

Abuminable posted:

If they get the injunction, it will be over faster than a glazed dozen within arm's reach of banditloaf.

G0RF posted:

Ben's story arc is just really amazing. After being raptured from the education system and snatched up to the opportunity of a lifetime to serve at the pleasure of his godking, he got to watch firsthand as that man destroyed — mistake after mistake, impulse after impulse, lie after lie — the greatest opportunity even bestowed upon an independent developer in gaming history.

Yet after all that, he really may end up unironically returning to the good work of cataloging Wing Commander arcana in the end. He took a pile of detritus off Sandi’s hands, stuff of interest to nearly no one besides Chris, Ben and a handful of whales of a certain age would possible give a crap about, yet with it he may find contentment and engagement for years more to come. Harkening back to the ‘greatness’ of what once was just as he did before Chris and Sandi came into his life, faithful until death.

Scruffpuff posted:

Ben is quite literally defective on a fundamental level. Something (or a great many somethings) are violently misfiring in his brain. I think a true victory is Ben snapping out of it, turning on CIG, and burying the true villains.

It totally won't happen. But in my private alternate universe I can imagine this ending any way I like.

D_Smart posted:

Today's wahlording unroll

CryTek's claims cites a breach for CIG/RSI not only showing the code during their Bugsmashers, but also sharing it with a third party, namely Faceware. Looking at the Lumberyard agreement, they have similar stipulations. So there is a possibility that if any Bugsmashers showed more than 50 lines of code, then arguably CIG/RSI are also in violation of the @AmznLumberyard agreement

quote:

when discussing Lumberyard Materials in our forums or elsewhere, you may include up to 50 lines of source code from the Lumberyard Materials for the sole purpose of discussing that code. You must identify us as the source of the code.

While this sort of accidental and incidental breaches are not worthy of lawsuits, the small claims in the CryTek lawsuit, tend to add up and compound the larger claims.

Bayonnefrog posted:

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Here's an article on some of the hilarity from back then: https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2016/01/star-citizen-backers-can-be-perma-banned-for-off-site-activity/17427/

And here's the text: https://archive.is/HcpZr#selection-2157.38-2157.361

Still the the most compelling exchange in this whole saga and really ground zero for the anti-SC v SC people and the reason why I really got interested in this whole story. It was all to incredible. Here you have a paying customer (backer) laying out his arguments as to why he feels there are huge issues with how long the game is taking and why so little has been done and your #1 marketing person can't answer them at all except to get personal and defense. Utterly incredible and completely unprofessional. How could one customer service exchange cause them to get so unhinged? Because the insights Beer provides hit too close to home I think.

For someone claiming to be "the best salesperson in the world" (another incredible line and hilarious) she certainly did a terrible job of it in those emails. Instead of trying to sell it basically personally attacked a guy for having a different opinion. And for people wondering why the SC is toxic and insular it's because the top people leading the project (Sandi and Chris) are themselves as we just saw. Beer asking legit questions and she takes it all personal and basically tells him to f off.

Skadden will have a heyday with these people.

reddit posted:

I'm about out of good faith for Chris. It's been one hell of a wait. If they can't resolve the garbage performance and start making leaps in development now that "the core of the game is there" I'm going to completely stop telling people about the game. Seriously tired of people giving me poo poo just because I'm excited for a game that has, so far, disappointed absolutely every single one of my friends, RL and online gaming friends.

biglads posted:

I would say they are abandoning ship, but as they only have pictures of ships they can't really.

Cao Ni Ma posted:

reddit posted:

Even if Derek turns out right, he's still a massive jackwad lol

Acceptance stage

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Bayonnefrog posted:

Still the the most compelling exchange in this whole saga and really ground zero for the anti-SC v SC people and the reason why I really got interested in this whole story. It was all to incredible. Here you have a paying customer (backer) laying out his arguments as to why he feels there are huge issues with how long the game is taking and why so little has been done and your #1 marketing person can't answer them at all except to get personal and defense. Utterly incredible and completely unprofessional. How could one customer service exchange cause them to get so unhinged? Because the insights Beer provides hit too close to home I think.

The part that I particularly appreciate is that the entire CS exchange started off as me asking why I was banned. Any competent customer service team would have reviewed the request, responded with a very simple answer, and either corrected the action or affirmed their position. A competent community management team would have never let it get to that point, as there would be no subjectivity in the rules or they would have taken advantage of the situation to make an example of me, refund everything, and simply state "given Beer4TheBeerGod's actions outside of this community we no longer wish to have him as a customer." Boom, done, move on. They can do that, it galvanizes the community and ostracizes me, and we all move on. As usual they're not sufficiently competent to do that and then Sandi made the mistake of expanding the scope of the conversation and allow me an opportunity to air my grievances. So I did, and she made the mistake of responding to them without any consideration of the consequences of doing so. She made her personal feelings known, repeatedly displaying an egregious lack of respect for the customers who are funding her lifestyle and an almost dismissive attitude towards some very real and very serious problems with the development, and did so assuming that I would keep those feelings to myself. This lack of professionalism should come as no surprise to a company that secretly labels their customers as "special snowflakes" or links to external information as part of their internal customer service system.

You're right about this being ground zero; it's a perfect litmus test for how someone views Star Citizen and what side of an increasingly sharp divide they fall on. Either they read that and think that CIG is run by incompetent amateurs, or they read it and get angry that I violated common decency by sharing a private communication. The latter interpretation is particularly interesting because they completely ignore the contents to focus on what they perceive to be a personal attack, which is why having a reasonable conversation is nearly impossible. You saw the same thing with Erris and INN when they accused me of fabricating the whole thing and then completely disappeared when I called them out and offered to provide any reasonable evidence demonstrating its validity. They don't care about the truth, they only care about how to reinforce what they already know. This whole fiasco has actually gone a long way towards helping me understand why politics, religion, and attitudes in general are so entrenched.

TheAgent posted:

Nyast posted:

Where's this "Crytek is broke" storyline coming from anyways ? Honnest question.

I know they've had financial difficulties a few years ago, but then they got a $70M cash inflow from Amazon, so I'd say right now they should be doing fine, aren't they ?

they actually have the entire turkish government bankrolling them now

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/55627/crytek-receive-500m-investment-turkish-gov/index.html

quote:

Turkish government will be investing a massive $500 million into the German developer

so yeah, no, crytek isn't hurting for money.

at all

D_Smart posted:

We are live!

Worth Clicking: https://www.facebook.com/GameTalkLive/videos/2079980148897050 (video: Derek, bootcha, and gamedev talk about Star Citizen for 1hr. Derek surprisingly gives CIG the most credit for effort)

Scruffpuff posted:

Spiderdrake posted:

It's really loving funny that in the video the "why no balanced panel?" comes up right after all three of you said the space doors and other spending are at their discretion. Oh man, so negative! Claiming the studio should have its own agency on its spending!

The poo poo that bothers me about the "balanced" bitching, and this goes for more than just Star Citizen, is that "balance" is constantly misconstrued to reflect that if a story has 2 sides, then those sides must receive equal time, even when one side is batshit insane.

A balanced discussion of Star Citizen of say 4 people, would have all 4 thinking it's cool in 2013, 1 questioning it and 3 backing it in 2014, 2 vs. 2 in 2015, 1 backer and 3 skeptics, in 2016, and 4 people knowing damned well it's bullshit in 2017. That's what balance is - a proportional reflection of reality, not a constant reassertion of people's egos and the reinforcement of the belief that "all opinions are equally valid."

D_Smart posted:

hot balls man no homo posted:

Really guys? You couldn't scrounge up one single solitary person to talk on stream about why star citizen is good? It shouldn't be that hard, there are five, maybe six SC streamers that talk about how great star citizen is for hours every day. Oh wait, they're paid shills and wouldn't want to get spanked by Derek on a stream that they can't shut down...

I reached out to a bunch of them, including Montoya who said on Thurs that he would do it. Then he disappeared. Some even contacted the organizer, then disappeared.

But yeah, they're all cowardly fucks who only function in their sad little bubble with Shitizens as their audience. Even Montoya, who isn't as crazy as those other guys like Astropub, Twerk17, BoredGamer, WTFO et al, didn't want to do the show.

Also, FailureToReport who I also recommended, since he was a backer and has a unique insight, was confirmed. And minutes before we were to go live, he loving bailed. He had an "emergency". Leaving the hosts scrambling to find a replacement (which was Kevin) in less than 15 mins! Which is why we started late.

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/942901625227829248

thatguy posted:

quote:

Is Star Citizen out yet?

TheAgent posted:

Chris Roberts, Visionary
Sandi Gardiner, Actress
Ben Lesnick, Employed

Nellistos posted:

TheAgent posted:

holy poo poo people on sc_trades are trying to sell things at 20% to 25% below their value and they aren't moving at al lol

EightAce posted:

Massively Overpowered’s Worst MMO Business Model Award goes to Star Citizen

quote:

Star Citizen. Holy poo poo Star Citizen. Selling fake land in a game that doesn’t exist yet for real money. Enough said.

the slow pace of this game’s development coupled with the incessant drip of paid and arguably pay-to-win pixel ships — and now pixel land claims — all from a multi-million-dollar company whose combined crowdfund all by itself is currently bigger than all the other crowdfunded MMORPGs put together? It has worn on my very last nerve.

Boy, this was just the year of Star Citizen doubling down on “sell something that doesn’t exist yet but we promise will at one point exist,” huh? Systems that aren’t even yet in obvious development can now be bought in advance for a bunch of money! This isn’t shady at all! Runner-up: Guild Wars 2 and the amzing mount-skin lockbox.

Star Citizen. The longer that time goes by without a full game release, the more ridiculous it seems to be “selling land on the moon” (or pretend spaceships) that fans can’t fully enjoy right now. The expansion of this model to selling land claims was truly ridiculous and highlighted one of the big problems with many of these early access and crowdfunded MMOs.

I have to echo the Star Citizen here because it really tops my naughty list of worrisome features in a business model: It stacks payment mechanics on like they’re sprinkles and the tiers and access is further convoluted by its early backer roots.

haha

Lack of Gravitas posted:

Jeffrey McArthur passed away on Friday in Exton PA, aged 61.

An avid gamer and geek through and through, Jeffrey was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in December 2015 and came to our attention early in 2016 when he made a video asking if he "was too stupid to play Star Citizen", which resulted in him facing abuse from some of the more toxic members of the SC fanbase.

After undergoing surgery and chemotherapy, a CT scan in July 2016 showed his cancer to be gone, and he continued working and making many videos on his hobbies, gaming, computers, and Dungeons & Dragons.

In August this year, another CT scan showed his colon cancer had returned and spread, eventually metastasizing to his stomach. With a prognosis of only a 50% chance of surviving to the end of the year, Jeffrey decided not to undergo chemotherapy again, chosing to enjoy what time he had left to live without suffering the side effects that chemo had on his senses.

Jeffrey faced his death with immense grace and dignity, and I am very grateful to him for sharing his story with us along the way.

Rest in peace, Jeffrey.

juggalo baby coffin posted:

so i figured it was time i did some sort of effortpost given that i've been following this shitshow on and off since it started. this is less a post for true FUD-sippers, and more one as a response to all the people who have said 'well yeah its a scam now, but you guys have been calling it a scam for years, even when it was a legit game'.

This is how we knew it was a scam from very early on

So picture this. You know a guy, he's an architect. He's built pretty decent buildings in the past. He tells you that now he's going to build a mile tall tower. 'Ok', you think, 'I wanna see that. It's going to take some clever engineering to pull that off'.

At this point he's promising something that sounds difficult, but still within the bounds of what reality might permit. People are getting close to mile tall buildings, the limiting factors are mainly the cash cost and needing the right site to build it on.

Then the details start to leak out. How he's planning to make this building. 'It's going to be made of bricks and mortar,' he says, 'With a floor plan of 10 feet by 10 feet.'

At this point the jig is up. That's not happening. A mile tall building is possible, but not like that it isn't. But people who don't understand how buildings work at all are still suckered in by it.

That's what happened with star citizen. It seems like the average (non-paid) true believer is weirdly ignorant of how games work. I've seen a ton of posts from shitizens about how 'I've not played a game since ninteen-dickety, but I'm coming back for star citizen and I've bet the farm on it.'. If these people had kept up with games technology at all they would have smelled a scam from a mile away.

Now I'm not a game dev, but I've played a shitload of games, and modded a shitload of games. You come, over time, to see how things work, see where the shortcuts are to make it all work. You get to understand the tradeoff games have to make to deliver their core gameplay at reasonable performance. You also gain familiarity with the strengths of the major engines, as these days there just aren't that many.

But Chris Roberts comes out and says 'No shortcuts! Vast scope! Sim level physics! Hundreds of concurrent players! Fast paced FPS style combat! Top notch graphics! Cryengine!'

Which sounds great, but is OBVIOUSLY NOT GOING TO WORK. If someone tries to sell you a truck and says it handles like a sports car and gets the mileage of a subcompact, you know it's a loving lie. But because so many people know so little about game development, and have been tricked by a guy who has presented himself as Space Game King Arthur, returned in gaming's time of need, they give him money. Lots of money.

So two things happen when a game has over-promised:

A) the scope of the game is drastically cut back to something plausible and people are disappointed.
B) development staggers along pursuing an impossible dream until it runs out of cash and burns out.

When Star Citizen was relatively new I figured that A would happen. The dumb poo poo would get cut, the shortcuts would be put in to allow the game to work, dumbasses would be disappointed, but we might get a space game out of it. And I do actually love space games. The whole reason I bought E:D was because a friend linked me to star citizen and it gave me a hankering to fly around in a ship. I would like star citizen to be a real game and have all the stuff its promised. That would be great.

But what really killed Star Citizen for me was the fact that they cut off path A to themselves. They started selling expanded scope as pledges and poo poo. Stretch goals are one thing, they can get cut or delayed, but when you've 1:1 said 'Pledge here to get a fucken electronic warfare ship' you've honor bound yourself to implement electronic warfare. Add to that the extremely predatory pricing of all that poo poo and it became clear that this was more than just an over-scoped, over-ambitious project.

It was, and is, a bare-faced scam.

Beet Wagon posted:

This encapsulates Star Citizen for me in a way I doubt the OP could ever understand or recognize. It's got everything:

• The pointless joke literally run into the ground as the only bit of content
  
• The huge, empty, ill-advised planet
  
• The wonky physics, with the Big Benny's machine jittering all over the place
  
• The hilariously overwrought mocap of the guy doing his dumb victory dance
  
• The inability of commandos to affect change on anything (look at his feet in relation to the vending machine)
  

It's all just so perfect.

The Rabbi T. White posted:

I see Derek finally defeated the vending machine.

Daztek posted:

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

juggalo baby coffin posted:

reddit posted:

When will humans invent FTL drives? When will humanity cure cancer? When will we have world peace?
These are all important questions, and yet the answers remain elusive. Why? Because we haven't yet invented a machine to predict the future.
How does that apply here, you ask? Well, you see, Bob, attempting to determine when 3.0 will be out to the public would be attempting to predict the future, and, well, we're just not quite there yet.

this is an apt comparison because like FTL drives, star citizen being completed is forbidden by the laws of reality

Beet Wagon posted:

"He can't control the narrative!" I say, comparing my 400 followers to his 7,000 and wildly tweeting about the time my forums enemy went on a facebook stream to literally control the narrative.

Colostomy Bag posted:

Apologies to Charlies Daniels:

Roberts went down to LA he was looking for some funds to steal
He was in a bind cause he was way behind. He was willing to make a deal
When he came across this fossil writing a blog and tweetin' a lot
And Roberts jumped upon an airplane desk and said "Boy, let me tell you what."

"I bet you didn't know it, but I'm a developer too
And if you'd care to take a dare I'll make a bet with you
Now you write a pretty good blog, boy, but give the Roberts his due
I'll bet this concept jpeg against your soul cause I think I'm better than you."

The boy said, "My name's Derek, and it might be a sin
But I'll take your bet; and you're gonna regret cause I'm the best Warlord there's ever been."

Derek, fire up your blog and play your trolls hard
Cause CIG's broke in LA and Roberts steals the tards
And if you win you get to say "I told you sooo"
But if you lose the goons get your soul

Roberts peeled up his scalp and he said, "I'll start this show."
And hundreds flew from his fingertips as he delayed the show
And he pulled the funds across his wife and it made an evil hiss
And a band of shills joined in and it sounded something like this:

[Demonic Full Burn piece]

When Roberts finished, Derek said, "Well, you're pretty good ol' son
Play Star Citizen right there and let me finish on how it's done."

"Coutt's own the assets now time to get refunds!
Roberts in the house of decreasing funds;
Lesnick in the kitchen eating cookie dough
Roberts, does the hobo bite? No, backer, no

[Non-demonic Full Burn piece]

Roberts bowed his head because Skadden had him beat
And he laid that concept jpeg on the ground at Derek's feet
Derek said, "Roberts, just come on back if you ever wanna try again
Cause I've told you once--you son of a bitch--I'm the best Warlord there's ever been."
And he played:

"Coutt's own the assets now time to get refunds!
Roberts in the house of decreasing funds;
Lesnick in the kitchen eating cookie dough
Roberts, does the hobo bite? No, backer, no

ScoreLord posted:

Any Australians in the thread may wish to pick up the latest issue of PC PowerPlay; it contains a column predicting what will occur in the world of gaming in 2018, including a few key events for Star Citizen.

Loxbourne posted:

quote:

There was a sticked post in the SC sub that was that cartoon of Derek with *autistic screeching* over his head. That's how they view Derek and all the "haters".

This isn't as knee-jerk as it sounds. The citizens probably really DID perceive Derek's words as INSERT AUTISTIC SCREECHING HERE. They don't process the content of the media they consume, they process the emotions it made them feel. No citizen can remember what Ben or Chris or Tony said in episode 172 of Reverse the Hearse two years ago. But they can remember a powerful, idolised man told them he would give them their dreams, and that's all that registered in their brains. Does something make them feel hyped and pumped for Star Citizen? It goes in the GOOD category, is welcomed into their worldview, and the theorycrafting begins about how awesome this will be. Does something make them feel nervous or anxious or attacked? Then it goes in the BAD category and cannot be allowed to be real, ever.

To an extent this is the basis of all marketing, but a worldview this far gone is endemic to the kind of unsocialised, poorly-socially-developed, alienated person who is most vulnerable to cult recruitment. They don't have the self-worth that comes from a sense of their own accomplishments and an established place in a community to allow them to properly evaluate the marketing hype. They don't have other voices in their lives to provide something they can compare that hype to. Actually evaluating a statement means understanding it and sorting it into concepts the reader's mind can grasp, and that's scary when the statement includes criticism of the core of your self-identity. A cultist cannot do that. Their emotions are the only legitimate response to CIG marketing a cultist will accept.

Announcing a new ship? That makes them feel psyched! It's gonna be great flying that with their friends and their orgs, and Chris said orgs will seek you out if you have one (the Pioneer). Calling out the hefty price tag of a new ship? That makes them feel attacked, stop making them feel bad about a thing they were feeling good about a moment ago. You must be a goon or an alt or a shill or another evil word, because you want to harm me by making me feel bad. The backers evaluate all criticism by the disappointment and defensiveness the cultists themselves feel when they hear it. Not what the actual critic said.

You don't embrace Star Citizen with the same level of enthusiasm I do and that makes me sad. That hurts.

Why did you hurt me? You must have wanted to hurt me. Your motive cannot have been critique or evaluation or even well-intentioned concern, it can ONLY be to hurt me. You must hate me. So you hate Star Citizen. You are coming for me and I must ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK to stop you hurting me again!. The rest is mob mentality and nerds being shitlords in predictable ways.

We call Citizens "manchildren", this is how they behave like children. The content doesn't matter, only the way it makes them feel. Intent does not matter, if it hurts them to hear your words you must have meant to hurt them. You cannot be merely a critic or just curious about the project, you must be a hater who wants to harm them.

This is why they're so strangely blasé about release dates and feature lists. All that matters is how awesome it will be when 3.0 is released. If not 3.0, 3.1. If not 3.1, 4.0. It's gonna feel so awesome.

This is why critical bloggers and streamers must be attacked so viciously (setting aside considerations about grey market prices). Your words make me feel sad and that hurts so you must be deliberately attacking me. I will react as if you have directly assaulted me.

This is why they cheered when Chris said he won't give release dates. Release dates are just words in the mouths of people who hurt us. If Chris does not make promises, the haters have less ammunition!

This is why the hardcore cultists freeze and lock up when CIG fucks up the marketing, But but but CIG makes me feel GOOD and now I feel bad! Whyyyyyyyyyy...!.

Ultimately this is why they're pathologically incapable of evaluating the Crytek lawsuit. The lawsuit manifests in their heads as nothing but giant documents reading WE ARE HERE TO TAKE YOUR DREAMS AWAY. YES YOURS, CITIZEN 415762, YOUR DREAMS PERSONALLY. NYAR HAR HAR WE'RE SO EVIL, SO VERY VERY EVIL. They don't see the words on the page. They don't respond to the points raised. They respond to their emotional reaction of knowing a lawsuit was filed. That reaction is a combination of nervousness and bravado, grasping at any passing piece of information that might provide a way back out of the scary introspection - "mighty CIG will crush all before it!" "ORTWIN WILL BRING THE FUREH!" "This is just a Crytek cash grab!" "Please please please can that be true I'm scared!"

There's no point arguing with a Cultist over the substantive content of anything, lawsuit or critique or forum post, because the Citizens aren't reading the content. The content doesn't matter. The meaning doesn't matter. All that matters is that the lawsuit, the GOONS, the words of a critic or Chris's failure to play his own game or whatever it is...suddenly makes them feel anxious. So it must be rejected as hard and as thoroughly as possible to make the anxiety stop.

Mr.Tophat posted:

Filthy backers, let them stare into the bog that holds their reflection and dreams forever, let the water rise above their heads as they lose themselves to the vision, let their opinions rise like so many, 'glub-glub-glubs' to the surface, rendered mute and vacuous by their willingness to be immersed in their product.

My heart is hardened. The stage is set. The banners fly and those who seek reprieve from the coming consequences have tarried too long to escape judgement. Lesnik was the last. Crytek has sounded a shrill blast of war, and all those who attend it ride to end it all. The irregulars at Chris Robert's disposal speak softly of letting their wallets speak for them, for good and ill. And with it? I see a warlord who declares all these events are set in motion via his prophecy of, 'Beware the Crytek at launch."

Some believe it was called before the rising of capital. Some believe the final call has yet to be announced. I know this for certain. Until the end, just as in the beginning, I shall just post, and until that end, just as there was in that beginning so many years ago, there is parp.

Mr.Tophat posted:

The real treasure is the grief we made along the way

D_Smart posted:

I'm now at 6.5 months since first asking for a refund What's my next step? I can't believe my family is in this situation at Christmas time, I remember going to the beach in mid-summer the day I first asked!!!! Please help guys...

I'm incredibly embarrassed to admit it but $12,800.00... I had a gambling issue before and I guess CIG became my new addiction. It was money I didn't have, I was stupid and I've learned my lesson since then (including having therapy).

IcarusUpHigh posted:

The IGN teaser is up

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2017/12/...aa793dc4d00001d

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQTcf2bnRhY (video: Mark's character hops around a stationary ship and yells are people)

Scruffpuff posted:

Wow - a "cinematic" but no loving game. I'm not sure I can handle this unforeseen turn of events.

Bootcha posted:

Where's the CryEngine logo?

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Why yes, I am the pilot of this craft, watch me jump down 13 steps just to break my ankles.


Do you like my ridiculous chest armour and cock-cup? I designed it myself. You'll notice that, as a pilot, I often find myself requiring body armour in tight, closed cockpits.

Colostomy Bag posted:

What a confusing clusterfuck of an alpha trailer.

TheAgent posted:

the last time someone ran a marketing thing on IGN it was almost $50,000 for a simple highlight

your backer dollars at work lol

Taintrunner posted:

THERE'S NO loving FOOTAGE. OF SPACESHIPS. FLYING. IN THEIR loving. SPACE GAAAAAAAAMMMMMEEEEE

this whole goddamn thing is a scam so crobberts and sandi can become titans of industry running some lovely vfx studio in hollywood. there was never an actual game

Scruffpuff posted:

The flying ship is a photoshop and the footage is not in-game

I've never seen this level of openness and in-your-face audacity in a scam before. 99% of everything they put out is promising ongoing game development and implying tons of behind-the-scenes progress, but lightly scratch the surface and you see that the ONLY thing CIG has made is the superficial illusory stuff. They just put the scam right there out in the open, in your face, with full confidence. "Yep, we're completely full of poo poo, give us more cash and we'll make more fake trailers for a game nobody knows how to build."

And every day, it's working.

CrazyLoon posted:

I tried to imagine what it'd be like for CIG to be my dentist, but realized it'd probably just be some dude putting me on a neverending waiting list while sending me breath mint to help with the stench of my already compromised teeth as I slowly die from bacterial infection or somesuch.

But at least I'd die with the dream of the most perfect and painless evah dentist procedure!

Beet Wagon posted:

new splash page. Focuses heavily on mocap and melted faces. In fact the picture of spaceships doing space things is the only image that isn't animated if you mouse over it, because there is in fact no gameplay.

Also it would appear Gillian Anderson's agent wasn't able to get her out of her contract, based on how many times they mention her.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/squadron42

Scruffpuff posted:

So CIG put a conversation "tree" (which appears to be an opportunity to play the tutorial) over the unskippable non-gameplay cinematic, and this guy sees it and says "NO IT'S THE INNER THOUGHT SYSTEM".

"Inner Thought" system. Amazing how CIG manages to give a proper name to every mechanic they "develop" (otherwise known as stealing and then renaming to cover your tracks.)

Tip for CIG: you don't have to steal every gameplay element, rename it, then deny knowing about it and claiming you invented it. Especially since everything you reinvent has been broken poo poo. There's no shame in just using what the real game developers are using. You might even squeak out something resembling a smartphone app one day.

Rad Russian posted:

If any FPS engine basedgames taught me anything is that you can propel your tank to fly by firing the turret backwards. So I'd imagine there will be a goon space tank squadron spam firing backwards to fly the horde of tanks through space until we discover a poor citizen miner to gank. At which point we all surround him and then slowly rotate the turrets forward for 30 seconds of suspense.

Scruffpuff posted:

I imagine things at CIG must be awkward. It's hard to believe EVERYONE there has bad taste. So they poo poo out a trailer like this and all have to glance askew at each other, trying to dynamically gauge which ones realize it's pure distilled poo poo and which of them are fully down with the Kool-Aid.

Then comes the Autist King, and they have to present His Majesty with something that's been giving them douche-chills for the past several months, and deep inside they wish he'd also realize how poo poo it is, but when he smiles and says "It's just as I envisioned it" they all have their own visions of CribbityBobbityBoo getting a visit from Stimpire Invigilation teams.

hot balls man no homo posted:

big nipples big life posted:

CIG yanks the football away at the last second again.

I love you CIG, I really, really do.

Colostomy Bag posted:

What a trainwreck.

The hits keep on coming.

tuo posted:

Imagine not beeing able to show gameplay of your game after five years of development

Cao Ni Ma posted:

Seriously these guys were probably promised that they were going to have tomorrow off after working their asses off all week but nope

Sarsapariller posted:

Yesterday:
The eyes of the world are upon you, CIG! This is your moment! Take my energy!

Today:
Only an entitled shitbaby thinks that the company owes him a presentation!


This is peak Star Citizen

reddit posted:

Hi , huge french SC fan , concierge backer and all that poo poo , and i have to say im sad , not angry just sad .
You plan a livestream which is supposed to be a big communication tool to show SQ42 progress , you even team up with IGN , trying to build the hype.
I even saw an article on the first french videogame website , with positive comments , wanting to see what is coming and what SC / SQ42 really is , past the trolls and goons shitsayers. And what do we get ?
A 24h delay 20min before the show .... what ? How ?
How can you make something like that happen , are you a 10 man studio ? Or do you have a full community section with funding from suscriber , that's really unprofessional and you give goons another thing to laugh at.
If you were professional , everything would be ready since at least several days ... stop with amateurism please. 'Amateurism' may be a bit rude , but you have to do something way better (174M crowdfunded guys , sorry you re not considered as a small indie company anymore)
I hope you have amazing rock solid things to show tommorow otherwise what will remain from that is the hyped stream with teaser and everything getting delayed , clownfiesta all the way :/

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

an extremely star citizen holiday surprise

D_Smart posted:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/943933498313859076

Daztek posted:

From reddit

Mangoose posted:

loving CIG, I've had the worst case of blueballs since their bullshit, boring, playing-it-safe anniversary stream and these assholes delay the holiday one.

It's extra bad because goons turned out in force and the thread is moving at the speed of sound. It's like everyone turned up for a concert a couple of hours early to drink beer and have fun but then the band didn't show up, so we're just hanging around talking poo poo while finishing our alcohol.

It's not even 100% a metaphor, I've literally been drinking alcohol since the kids fell asleep in anticipation of this disaster.

OH and by the way... a loving TANK? Like their mountain of engineering debt wasn't high enough, now they have to include ground combat with gameplay value AND make it so there's situations where deploying a god drat tank is the strategically sound decision. Do these people know anything at all about tank warfare? I mean, it's not just a beach buggy with a giant cannon you send out for shits and giggles. Also, you have literal destroyers and carriers and poo poo that can, at will, enter atmosphere of seemingly any planetoid. Why the gently caress would you need to deploy slow, ground-bound artillery units? What the gently caress could they offer a combat situation that a loving corvette with some kickass space gun couldn't?

Stand by for the loving Orbital Bombardment pledge incentive rendering literally everything planetside obsolete in their lovely imaginary poo poo stupid poop game

loving melting down over stream delay, sorry

reddit posted:

Hi guys, I just got off twitter with Jared, basically "technical difficulties" doesn't cover the issue. Burst water main, a Car accident, and I quote "that and more."

Rad Russian posted:

First it's technical difficulties. Then Jared says his house got flooded AND someone else got into an accident. Now someone made him delete those tweets.

START THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES.

reddit posted:

Could be a Goon psychopath's work. Wouldn't be surprised if one of their flock is stepping up the game. These people are dangerous and severely mentally ill, sooner or later they'll snap.. even harder than usual.

Cao Ni Ma posted:

Even without a presentation hilarity finds a way.

Golli posted:

Tomorrow's stream.

"Unfortunately, the technical issues persist. Instead, please enjoy this complimentary screening of "American Satan: The Unrated Director's Cut"

XK posted:

quote:

He put it in quotation marks. Yeah, it was clumsy communication, but I'm pretty spergy and I saw the metaphor.

I saw it as maybe a metaphor, until he explicitly said that it did happen. I recall from previous posts that you're, Finnish, I think it was, so maybe there's a second language issue? To me, it was clear that he stated it was a thing that actually happened.

reddit posted:

After having a YEAR to make sure they got last year's holiday live stream right? (You didn't forget last year, now, did you?)
I'm sorry, I cannot defend CIG this time.

TheAgent posted:

like why you even delete the tweets unless you realized you 100% hosed up lol

the game is released, metaphorically

TheLastRoboKy posted:

I would have believed the broken water mains thing because CIG have never had a working pipeline in their existence.

reddit posted:

I went from showing everything to my friends to showing the occasional new ship. Every time I do though they ask "It is even a game yet?" and I have to shamefully say "No" only to be laughed at for paying money 3 years ago just to get a bunch of pretty pictures.
At first I thought they were wrong but I gotta admit that my mind is slowly changing. I can't help but feel that the money I spent on SC was just lost, like a failed investment.

reddit posted:

Yeah I got burned by last year's stream. It was so bad I actually turned it off because I felt so embarrassed in front of my friends. I said I'll just update them about the game's progress when it happens... over a year later and I nearly made the same mistake again.
There was a time I could barely contain my enthusiasm about this game, but now I strictly keep it to myself. CIG's livestream curse is something they really need to sort out.

Natron posted:

I was disappointed at first with the delay from CIG, but now I realize that this is actually a miracle.

CIG was running out of ideas, running out of time and money. Skadden's lawyers were phoning all day long, demanding to know about this and that, and Coutts' e-mails were filling up the inboxes of everyone in the LA office. They could only entertain us for a scant two hours with images of generic space ships and regurgitated faff from old 90's movies, and then we'd all have to back to the drudgery of our real lives. Hollow, like death. With only real games to play and our loving families to comfort us in our time of need.

But then, when no one was expecting it, just before the final flash of hilarity and gently caress-uppery that would send us off for 2017, the word came that the comedy would last much longer. Oh, and it did. The comedy burned brightly for 24 more hours! Far exceeding the limits of what we thought possible, the Goons' cups runneth over! Mirth and merriment spread across all the forums. Joyous words rang out from the signal boosters and the FUDsters, and for that day the Goons were more than satisfied by the offerings of the Crobberts.

And so it was, that on this day a new Goon tradition emerged! From now until eternity, on every 21st of December, we Goons shall light 24 candles, one for every extra hour of hilarity, and break our water mains, then get in a fender bender to honour the miracle that has been bestowed upon us.

Crobberts be praised, for he is the true giver of laughter!

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

big nipples big life posted:

This is even more damning tbh

CrazyLoon posted:

Basically what he's saying is: "We want to have shitizens comment on it live, while we also want it all staged and pre-recorded so that we get to pull off whatever smoke and mirrors we want and look like badasses."

10:1 the reason for the delay is that they couldn't even get the smoke and mirrors working sufficiently on time, because that's how hosed their game engine and 3.0 is right now. And 10:1 that tomorrow there'll STILL be glitches that they'll leave in the pre-recorded footage and cross their fingers that no one notices and that shitizens will defend!

Blue On Blue posted:

so their live stream isn't even live, it's just them playing a recorded stream... lol

and that somehow hosed up? wait what

wouldn't it be recorded and ready to go like, weeks ago?

reddit posted:

This doesn't even make sense. So CIG is telling all of us that they haven't finished filming and editing the video? And they only knew about that 40 minutes before it was supposed to air? It makes the cancellation even more disturbing. People need to be fired over this. I would fire the VP of marketing. Nepotism will stop them from firing that person though.

reddit posted:

Wow, they couldn't air a previously recorded show? loving incompetence AND arrogance.

Cao Ni Ma posted:

Even without a presentation hilarity finds a way.

Thoatse posted:

Who's up for a game of 'where's Archer'?

Beet Wagon posted:

well gently caress me that's just about as blatant as it gets.

Beet Wagon posted:

So they hosed with perspective and added some greeblies to the back of the turret but basically everything else lines up, including the major identifying marks on the chassis and the cowl over the barrel of the gun.

Cao Ni Ma posted:

I thought it was reaching at first but then I saw the camera and rocket pod things. I can't believe they are still archering things to this day.

Golli posted:

Score another one for the goon forensics team.

D_Smart posted:

https://www.pcinvasion.com/star-citizen-now-selling-tanks

quote:

Despite the fact that Star Citizen is nowhere near ready and could take forever to be in a releasable state, CIG has decided that what fans need now is a tank. The reveal came as a VIP exclusive so it’s not visible to mere mortals but the image of the full page can be seen below.

With the Squadron 42 stream event thing happening this week the timing is perfect to suck in some more cash and throw out another elaborate idea. Seriously, this is taking the piss a little. With a basic option being $95 going up to $725. CIG, seriously, GTFO.

Again, I will reiterate. Backers should avoid pumping more money into Star Citizen. With the Crytek legal case looming and CIG trying to entice players with new “features” such as the non-existant land acquisition, reveals like this stink of desperation.

Toops posted:

I see it more as a leader whose every decision, every action is moving towards one goal: building video game that will be considered fun by the people who play it. How do you do that? By creating an environment where working code is built as often as possible to provide gameplay feedback, and that feedback drives your development iterations. The technical poo poo doesn't matter as an end in itself. "- moons" is not progress unless it yields fun, playable content that feels good. Now, contrast that with CIG. They roll out some shiny bullshot trailer of a planetary landing, with no grounding in anything playable or real, and in Chris's mind, that's literally Mission Accomplished. Meanwhile, 11 months later when you finally get a build, you just noclip down to a wet towel draped over a sphere for 16 minutes at 8.3 FPS, and when you get there, there's loving nothing to do.

PederP posted:

Witcher 3 had Charles Dance as a voice actor, and reaped tons of publicity from this, without having to do mocap or face scans. Mocap should be a tool for animators. It can be really difficult to get some motions right without mocap. I remember an episode from a game I worked on where the animators needed mocap of dumping a body in a dumpsters (not the the easiest thing to manually animate so it looks right). Problem was that humans are actually pretty heavy, so most people can't really do this without having it look silly. So a really big guy and a really small woman did the mocap, and animators did their magic to make it fit the body sizes in-game.

It's a monumental waste of money to drag any kind of highly paid actor, especially an A-lister, through mocap for a game. Face scanning and expression mocap makes good sense. But the pudgy-suit mocap? Not necessary for the marketing effect.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

STAR CITIZEN EXPLAINED IN ONE GIF!

Mne nravitsya posted:

A song honor of the Christmas Event

Crashing through the show
In a build no-one can play
O'er the moon we go
(Goons) Laughing all the way

Alarm bells start to ring
Derek Smart was right
What fun it is to watch this poo poo
It's the E.L.E tonight

(Oh) Jingle Bells, Lesnick smells
Crytek seized the day
The Crob-Mobile lost it's wheels
And the law firms are in play

(Oh) Jingle Bells, Tanks won't sell
Chris lost his toupee
The Coutts are mad, the game is bad
And the cultists blame SA

Sarsapariller posted:

Timestamps:
Cafeteria Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=117s
Ser Davos gets shoved by the map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=725s
Crobberts rips off terminator joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=982s
Encounter with mopman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=1058s
Man disappears from flight deck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=1124s
Hammil's dancy landing gear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=1441s
Dancing flight deck guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=1498s
Fighter launches, demo takes a poo poo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=1537s
Amazing appearing chair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg#t=2103s
Janky fighter combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=2271s
Player barely survives navigating a stationary spacecraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=2640s
40 minute pointless flight to planet surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=2785s
Astonishing grate-handling gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=3611s
Stealth takedowns and combat with static target-dummy AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NEaIgmpDg&t=3676s

Not pictured: 2 hours of pointless running

Brazilianpeanutwar posted:

double insta ban

big nipples big life posted:

commando is probably an autoban word which is as hell

spacetoaster posted:

skaboomizzy posted:

"This is a make-or-break stream to convince thousands of backers not to bail on this scam, so be sure to wear your nerdiest t-shirt."

spacetoaster posted:

LOL

He said: "Here's the infamous door."

drat Dirty Ape posted:

"This is very very early stage stuff....."


Hahahaha

G0RF posted:

Chris Roberts in January of 2017: "Squadron 42 will be finished this year. Probably."

Steve Bender in December of 2017: - "This is very early stage stuff."

spacetoaster posted:

That must be the water main that exploded yesterday.



Just imagine having a giant poo poo pipe in your office.

Blue On Blue posted:

This is poo poo. I noticed a few animation jumps already. I don't see shadows on characters. And yes now the player is casually strolling through the reactor room for some loving reason ? Oh wait simply so they could show off the ai and their scripted canned dialog

BigglesSWE posted:

WE HAVE MOP REPEAT THE MOP HAS LANDED

History Comes Inside! posted:

SPACE MOP IS IN

skaboomizzy posted:

Mopping CONFIRMED

Beet Wagon posted:

faces are hard

happyhippy posted:

I call it progress to be honest.

Last year they couldn't carry a box 10 feet without crashing.
Now they can carry grates!

Beet Wagon posted:

https://i.imgur.com/AWHZLyr.mp4

this is some Source FilmMaker quality poo poo right here

D_Smart posted:

My 42-part thread on wot I thought of the stream

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/944349736307392513.html

thatguy posted:

quote:

Anyone know the font for the "inner thoughts" UI? I could definitely have some fun with that.

The font is called Orbitron.

I'd animate it but I'm tired.

Daztek posted:

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

G0RF posted:

In light of today’s livestream, I still think Squadron 42 is an absolute black hole project sucking light, gas and heat away from Star Citizen and bending time itself, slowing it, crushing it.

The demo today, with its ponderously long “flying towards nothing doing nothing” segments were cinematic NyQuil that no amount of Fidelity can overcome. The hardest of the hardcore may delight in the presumed ambitiousness of it yet Chris already has their money, and the demo showed only too often how heavy the burden becomes when alloying the dogfighting game to the space sim. All that blessed freedom — to walk around the giant ship, to fly around a giant map — is a curse and damnation for how can it be made fun? Can CIG give NPCs that can’t be counted on to even walk straight enough vitality to be interesting enough on their own as you encounter one after the next in Super Hallway Runner?

Can a studio that can’t even craft a satisfying racing module or FPS game mode with an FPS engine overcome a too much time to kill / too much space to fill hurdle so high even Rockstar — the absolute masters of the time killing / space filling mini game — would steer the hell away from it?

“Signs point to No.”

Yet clear these seemingly impossible bars he must if he’s to hope of finding new buyers for Squadron 42.

Ambition unto itself is not a virtue when the bearer is blind to their own limitations, when the loftiest goals are declared yet planning is eschewed because it looks like constraint. In fact, it isn’t Ambition at all but rather its dim-witted sibling, Folly. And the Folly of Roberts was on fullest display today, in year five, when the game he told the world would be finished this year “probably” was revealed as pre-Alpha with his own team declaring the work only just begun.

I don’t write any of this with glee because it honestly makes me sad to reflect on. The farce will be with us, always, yet there’s a heaviness in the consideration of so much squandered opportunity.

ewe2 posted:

Have a punky Xmas with this end-of-year all-notes-must-go offering:
Jingle Parps

while I'm trying to get something usable.

Here is Jingle Parps Mix #2 for the Dalek-challenged listener.


lyrics

SelenicMartian posted:

https://i.imgur.com/igoyJqn.mp4

Amarcarts posted:

It's such a cringefest when they showcase "stealth kills" because it's very obvious they're doing it to hide how bad the enemy AI is. They did the same thing a year ago with the video on the desert planet and the "Sand Nomads".

Beet Wagon posted:

There's actually a very simple explanation for a lot of the graphical oddities in the demo



it's poo poo

Tokamak posted:

IT BEGINS

reddit posted:

3.1 Is A More Major Update Than 3.0 in Some Ways

Abuminable posted:

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

https://clips.twitch.tv/RealRudePistachioAliens (video: FTR sits down in pilots seat, without pressing anything it slingshots itself into the nearest wall)
The game's so bad even the ships want to kill themselves.

El Grillo posted:

Is it just me or was even the audio in that SQ42 demo loving terrible? It was all over the place. And why are they using lightning sound like all the time in the background. Not even when they flew into the weird space lightning bit, I mean just on the big carrier at the beginning there was loads of lightning noise. And the score was so heavy and overblown the whole goddamn time, even when they were just flying along in a straight line for 3 minutes it would build up as if some epic thing was happening on screen... But it wasn't.

my favourite bit in the demo was when they spent 2 minutes zooming in on flight deck crew before the player was about to take off. You couldn't see the crew because of the terrible lighting, meaning that all those animations they spent so much time making and then making a film about how they made them, were not seen. Except those that were, were absolute garbage.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

So I caught up with the thread, and I'm about 10 minutes in to the demo.

It's poo poo. Everything is poo poo. The programming is poo poo, the characters are poo poo, the visuals are poo poo, the writing is poo poo, the directing is poo poo, the constant cut-scenes in what is supposed to be a seamless first person experience is poo poo, it's all poo poo. I'm so glad I got a refund.

SelenicMartian posted:

tuo posted:

Shitizens: Chris Roberts is a perfectionist, and he won't show SQ42 before it's perfect
<CIG shows buggy pre-alpha SQ42 vertical slice with < 20 fps which contains everything we have seen the last five years, making it the current "this is where we're at, deal with it">
Shitizens: Well....yeah...you see...he is a perfectionist in that everything has to be perfect before moving on to the next th....
<CIG releases 3.0, broken as gently caress>
Shitzens: But...but....Chris perfectionist?

XK posted:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/944379864861298689
(tweet: I am going to do everything in my power, and will spare NO time or expense to put Chris Roberts in jail. I'm done. 42. End)

The gauntlet has been thrown.

Bootcha posted:

Merry Christmas...

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU3uEBUBIEA (video: Sunk Cost Galaxy - Overture)

Bootcha posted:

Oh poo poo you forgot to check your stocking...

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hPxnBAdbbo (video: Sunk Cost Galaxy - Foreword: The Reliable Narrator)

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

Chris has made a rare appearance on his weird discord knock-off in order to provide the base with some fresh talking points for the new year.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/1/thread/star-citizen-alpha-3-0-performance-tidbits

Chris Roberts posted:

The number of players on the server has a lot less impact in client performance than one would think. During the final stages of PTU we ran tests with 50 players, 40 players and 30 players per server. While there was a slight improvement in performance it wasn't proportional to the player count.

[...] Fill up a Caterpillar with cargo, blow it up over an Outpost on a moon and you can bring the clients and servers to their knees [...] Have a bunch of people fly around in Starfarers and Caterpillars and you're straining the clients and server far more than you would be with a bunch of Auroras and Hornets.

We have solutions for all these things [...] but they are not something we can complete in a week or two.

At Citizen Con we announced that we are moving to a quarterly release schedule that is less feature bound and more focused on regular updates [...]

If you are getting performance in the sub 10-15 FPS range there is definitely something not right, especially if you have a quad core CPU, 4GB video card and at least 16GB.[...] so please be patient.

Finally I want to say thank you to everyone out there for supporting Star Citizen, your enthusiasm and dedication really does energize the team and myself. We are building something truly special that is only possible because of you.

Happy Holidays everyone!

XK posted:

quote:

We don't really understand why the game behaves how it does.

FPS goes up. FPS goes down. Nobody can explain that.

Faith restored.

Scruffpuff posted:

CR's little holiday diatribe is nice because it reveals his misunderstanding of what's wrong. His entire post was all about performance this, FPS that, and so on.

As if the performance itself was a problem and it needs to be handled.

Not the case Crobbler - the abysmal performance is a symptom.

It's like having a kid coughing up blood and phlegm all over the floor, so you say "It's ok, I've got more people coming in with mops, they'll be able to keep up and keep this floor clean." You're rather missing the point.

3.0 is irrelevant - it's just another inevitable consequence of the mistake they made in 2015 when they released what they called "2.0" - a cynical ploy to prove a "game" existed and an excuse to begin denying refunds. The cancer released to the PU two years ago is simply continuing to advance through its stages.

We're at stage IV now.

Dusty Lens posted:

It's good to see that they're giving some consideration to the idea of shifting away from a model that stream all data everywhere at once to the player regardless of location.

It's an unconventional approach but this is an unprecedented undertaking.

XK posted:

Chris's Christmas message:

The game is poo poo. We don't know what's going on. The ships and cargo are loving up the engine.

We might address things mid January, or later.

Merry Christmas.

nnnotime posted:

Chris Roberts posted:

From the data we see it is not so much about player count but more about WHAT the players are doing. In our internal testing we didn't witness the performance issues that we saw on PTU or Live once thousands of players got in and started doing all sorts of crazy things.

Crazy things? You mean crazy things, like, oh, I don't know, trying to play a sandbox game like a sandbox game, which was the expectations that you set from Star Citizen's very beginning?

You should see plainly now, Citizens: Croberts is already the first to blame you, the esteemed pledgers, when anything starts to go wrong with his game.

Virtual Captain posted:

CIG has what, 15-30% of their ships flyable, I'm guessing >10% of the player items/armor they envision for the full release. They have no idea why performance is garbage with just this small set of assets. MoMA help me out; what fantasy land do you reside in that this starts working and more than 10 players can engage in complex twitch combat? Have you already admitted to yourself that this project will never see a 30 person battle?

Absolutely none of this is built in a modular or scalable fashion. They've said repeatedly that every ship is a special case and this is evidenced by years implementing the small handful they have currently.

Scruffpuff posted:

I guess we've finally reached the final stage. Chris never had a vision, and nobody else at CIG knows what Star Citizen is. Their plan appears to be to take a bunch of assets and dump them in a box:

And somehow "emergent gameplay" will spring to life from that. But nobody can get any of the assets working, or the physics, or anything at all.

Half a decade, $170 million, and a blithering idiot who willfully misrepresented his ability to lead this project.

And now, just in time for Christmas, a new Articles of Faith is released to keep the backers pumping him his unearned and undeserved windfall so he can continue to fail at every single thing he attempts.

Every day is Peak CIG.

D_Smart posted:

I knew croberts had balls. But I had no idea they were Platinum. I just read his latest. Wow. Not only is he blaming gamers for doing precisely the features he sold them, but also managed to blame *them* for the server issues.

That poo poo is never getting fixed. They already reached zero barrier on what they could with the game and engine.

Dusty Lens posted:

kw0134 posted:

So Crobbers is saying the players are doing weird things, like starting the game.

To be fair he's not wrong

Dusty Lens posted:

Let's flashback to when CIG was first rolling out their cash shop and people (before the narrative was given enough time to shift) reacted very poorly to the system that remains in place to this day.

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/232661

BluesShaman posted:

lmfao

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

That spectrum thread is great, backers detail just how broken the game is, Chris and Toni throwing nonsense words at them until they are appeased, backers then fawning over them for taking the time to do "work" on Christmas. Star Citizen is good.

D_Smart posted:

I spent 15 mins in that thread. I didn't know what to expect. Then I realized that, for as much as we take this to be a joke, this - this - is a loving cult. Can you imagine what would happen if EA, Activision et al pulled this poo poo?

juggalo baby coffin posted:

WE'RE SANDY AND CROBERTS, AVARICE AND GREED
WE TOOK ADVANTAGE OF THE WHALES, JUST IGNOOORED THE GLA
WE SPECIALISED IN JPG SALES, SPREADING DREAMS AND SCOPE
AND IF YOU SPAWNED THE WRONG TEST SHIP
WE SIMPLY THREW YOU OUT

thatguy posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

quote:

So It'll take them till june/july to add the content that was originally schedule for 3.0 back into 3.0. So that leaves them 6 months to add mining into the game when it took them a full 2 years to go from video presentation of 3.0 to actual 3.0 release.

They are complaining about cargo ships breaking the game, imagine when mineral haulers get added to the game. Imagine when cruise liners need to be simulated into the game. Imagine when the cruise liner gets blown up as its arriving into port and the server has to simulate all those corpses

Just a reminder on what 3.0 promised vs delivered:

Added
Walk anywhere on planets and moons ¹
Seamless landings ¹
Immersive landing pad and traffic control from NPCs ¹
Day and night cycles ¹

Barely qualifies
Expand the Stanton System (two moons isn't much) ¹
Cargo Transport (Couple missions, no actual profession) ¹

Totally missing
Basic mining ¹
Trading ^{1 2}
Piracy ¹
Mercenary ¹
Bounty hunting ^{1 2}
Diverse NPC actions ¹
Economy driven missions ¹
Increased mission complexity ¹


Search "patch", "3.1", "3.2", "3.3", or "4.0" on https://starcitizentracker.github.io/ for dreams not yet shattered.

Mr Fronts posted:

CR: I would like to point out that ever since I got the legal threat from Skelling I have been working on this response. I worked on this until 5am last night, and a couple more hours this morning in the UK, where I am currently am in preparation for ATV in a week from Saturday. Conservatively it’s taken me about eight hours to write. This is time I could have spent working on the game instead of dealing with a Crytek instigated drama. And this is really what annoys me – that their silly lawsuits occasionally gain traction and pull me away from the very thing I prefer to do and the very thing everyone wants me to do and the very thing Crytek accuses me of not doing – CHANGING THE ENGINE/NOT CHANGING THE ENGINE (-note -check with Ortwin which one I should go with)! By constantly nagging, writing warning letters and soliciting solicitors in the background to enforce a dumb old licensing agreement, Crytek is waging guerrilla warfare on my time, the time of other key executives, and the peace of mind of our employees and backers.

The Titanic posted:

I have to believe that somewhere in CIG high command, somebody has come to the realization that the mmo is never going to happen without an enormous, very lengthy total rewrite. What they built so far may be good for Sq42 drop-in/drop-out coop with like 4 friends, but that’s about it.

I think, because I have to think, is that this keeps getting reported to Roberts, but he either ignores it, or demands people soldier through the problem because he came up with the solution already (mesh tech) and they just need to apply the code to it.

I believe that CR sees “mmo rewrite: 6 years to alpha” and he can’t wrap his mind around another 6+ years just to get a very basic functional vertical slice of his dream mmo out the door. He sees the arena game, and sees how it works, but that it just needs more tweaking with his great ideas to make it a 10,000+ player mmo with his magical ideas.

Now they are basically where they were 1.5 years ago with an engine that still can’t work, except now the added in hack jobs are really starting to add up. The system literally can be extended no further, and even the best computers can no longer play it.

Lack of planning, lack of comprehension, and hubris are going to force more people away this year since the only thing they can do to make this mess work is rebuild it as an actual mmo, which will take a decade or so, or remove components to help get it sort of functional again. They may be able to figure out how to band aid stuff, but they’re looking at teeny tiny gains out of that.

Scruffpuff posted:

quote:

The system literally can be extended no further, and even the best computers can no longer play it.

I'm gonna zero in on this point because it contains something that bugs the poo poo out of me. This insistence from Chris Roberts, and the cultists, that you need a "powerful PC" to play his game, the implicit statement being that his game is an avatar of gaming perfection that requires more than a mere mortal vessel to contain it.

The reason it bothers me is because for years I've been fighting one of the most pervasive lies in PC optimization history regarding the need of a "powerful PC" and why that might be the case. There are precisely two, and only two, reasons you need an absurdly powerful PC to play a game (or do anything else):

1) The game is using new graphics technologies that are just now in their infancy and might not even be optimized or build into the GPU architecture, they're pushing the edges of realistic physics calculations, they're pushing the edges of how many on-screen players can be in a single battle - anything where the developers are 100% aware that they're pushing it, and usually realize that in a couple of years hardware will be more than capable of handling it. "Max Settings" for these games is usually nothing more than hedging their bets.

2) The game is complete poo poo that fails to optimize nearly anything, wastes CPU cycles on nonsense that doesn't affect the player, overheated GPU contributions that are not visible to the player, constant calculation of irrelevant AI, and just wastes I/O through poor decisions and logic.

Star Citizen is #2 masquerading as #1. Star Citizen is not doing anything that hasn't been done before, far better, by smaller teams, and for cheaper. But there's an undercurrent to their bullshit that they're the next Crysis (engine choice deepens this illusion) and they're pushing the envelope so hard you guys that your PC running Star Citizen well is the de facto test for whether or not your gaming testicles have dropped.

It's all bullshit. It runs like poo poo because it is poo poo, and the only thing better hardware will do is allow Star Citizen to crash faster.

PederP posted:

Even if Star Citizen had the best technical and managerial leadership in the world, it still could not achieve what they want with the current generation of engines. The ambition and scale they boast so much about does not "merely" require skillfully adapting current technology. It requires a paradigm shift applied to an entirely new engine.

Nevertheless, with the massive budget they had, there was a chance to make the best of the engine they were contractually obligated to use. This would involve doing the proper analysis and protoworking. Working out what the challenges were, taking the time and effort to decide where to compromise, where to develop entirely new technology and where to experiment. And not actively building a playable game while doing this.

Instead they've simply layered every single thing on top of the existing systems. I am hard pressed to see an instance of actual innovation and novel development. Everything is CryEngine hammered into shape until it fits or breaks - and then duct-taped or covered up, if it broke. I am baffled by this approach. Why didn't they build actual server technology? Why is there no custom network protocol? Why didn't they build a custom system to handle scalability of physics? Every single issue they're having to solve now just to make 3.0 playable, could've addressed at the beginning of the project. Even with the vague and ever-expanding scope, they knew they were build an MMO with spaceships.

I wasn't along for this bizarro ride early on, as I took one look at the original pitch, was tempted but then remembered how difficult it is to build a space MMO, and decided to keep my wallet closed until they had more to show and I was confident this was not going to be a shallow pay-to-win game. But can someone who was a backer and fan back then comment on why early development took this weird path of refusing to make any new technology, and instead simply pretend CryEngine could be hammered into an MMO engine?

Galarox posted:

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

https://i.imgur.com/YSee1I0.mp4

kw0134 posted:

Pleadings, rulings, motions, etc., are public information and will be available to people with PACER accounts a day after it's filed with the court. The response to the complaint can be more or less a single page with Ortwin scribbling in crayon "lol no" to all the allegations and that ought to suffice for the purposes of entering a response and avoiding a default. Of course the proper way to do this is to lay an appropriate foundation for your defense, and there are certain things you must plead at this time or it's waived (jurisdictional flaws, e.g.) but CIG can clownshow the case for a little while longer with the bare minimum needed.

Given that low, low barrier I don't expect a default but...it's CIG. Who the gently caress knows. Maybe this will explode in a supernova of stupidity before it finally fades away, the bright star in the sunk cost galaxy that shines all too briefly before being devoured by the Skadden supermassive black hole.

Combat Theory posted:

A friend who would like to stay anonymous felt compelled to write an effortpost about the performance situation in star citizen 3.0 and CIGs future outlook.

It's s a long post but it's well worth the read.

I take no credit for this.

quote:

Performance, i.: Where is the PC Master Race?

A core tenant of Star Citizen's advertising was appealing to this facet of the PC master race, remaining unshackled by the plebeian hardware of consoles and leaving the sky as the limit for the smooth, buttery goodness of a game that utilized more fully the current - and future - maximum potential of gaming PC hardware.

And yet Star Citizen is currently a slideshow that frequently dips into the single digits. This is unacceptable for even a console title, of which there are many TCRs (Technical Certification Requirements, i.e., "the console maker won't let you ship your game on it if it fails these") regarding performance. That is why, for all of Reddit's angst, you very rarely see a console game that actually has noticeably poor performance. As has been consistently demonstrated over the past decades, 30 FPS is simply Good Enough.

But Star Citizen doesn't even have that. And it is unlikely to have that in the near term. And it is unlikely to remain sustainable as ever more features are bolted on. Performance is, ultimately, one of the final litmus tests by which a game's programming is judged. It is the sum total of all of its parts, working in concert, in real time, on a player's hardware. Performance is unlike any other aspect of game development, in that it can almost never be simply patched after the fact. It must be explicitly designed for from the start, as no matter how many people you assign to the task of "performance is bad," eventually, they stop being able to continue to claw back the framerate in 1 and 2 FPS increments through additional work.

Why is this? Join me for a guided journey of the dark and mystical land of low-level performance optimization in video games; a glimpse behind the curtain of what outwardly appears to be nothing short of wizardry with extra steps.



Performance, ii.: Design philosophy.

Every project is different, as is the way that performance impacts it. Some projects never need to worry about performance, such as the common meme of the student's simple Python script that processes some small amount of data, perhaps putting it into an excel spreadsheet, which is sufficiently small that it simply doesn't matter how poorly optimized it is. So long as the data is good, no one cares if it takes one second or three seconds to execute.

Some projects, such as games, live and die by performance, as no one will play a game that is a literal slideshow. Therefore, the game's architecture must be designed properly from the very beginning, as perhaps a mere 25% of performance optimization is the result of clever programming tricks, with the remaining 75% being the result of good design.

The house analogy has constantly been used to describe this phenomenon. And with good reason, as it is quite accurate. The design of code is tricky business, as it is something invisible to players. Anyone can see if the jackets have enough fidelity or not, and anyone can see whether the fluid dynamics in the drink glass provide sufficient immersion for the eventual drink mixing minigame. Conversely, only a tiny fraction of individuals, who are both highly technical and highly experienced, will be able to see whether or not code design is proper.

"But it's an alphaaaaaa," come the cries of the faithful. No. The entire point of this is to expound upon the fact that these issues are ones which should never be encountered by the time a game gets into the alpha stage. These are things that must be executed properly before many of the game's systems are in place.

And by all accounts, the people at CIG who were experienced enough to properly guide the design left long ago, leaving what seem to be primarily inexperienced members to attempt to do so. I have nothing bad to say about those working in the trenches, as it is not their fault at all. If someone gets told to implement volumetric fog, and they do so, then that should in fact be celebrated - it is the management who decided to mis-allocate the resources to prioritize volumetric fog over more important tasks which should earn one's ire. Similarly, I have nothing but respect for those who still attempt to fix and improve the code's design even if they are unqualified to do so - I trust that they are in fact trying their best. These criticisms should be, once more, directed to those who mismanaged the project and put them in that position to begin with.



Performance, part iii.: Case study of poor design.

"One issue is with animation updates of attachments, specifically doors."
Doors!
Doors are a prime example of something which has been needlessly over-engineered. Before, I have heard stories of ridiculous things such as fixing an issue with moving through doorways by placing invisible physics objects inside of them rather than properly fixing their collision bounds. While not directly related to performance, this is the kind of thing that we call a 'kludge' - a quick and dirty fix that is not considered proper. It's like fixing a rotting stairway by covering it up with pieces of plywood. It might work in the short term and allow you to continue traversing the stairway with less risk of putting your foot through a weak piece of wood as you take a step, but it is certainly not a proper solution. Because next month, you might want to add a ramp to your stairway to allow access to those in wheelchairs, but now you not only have to work around the rotting steps, but the plywood you dumped over it to cover it up. Similiarly, the next time they want to change how doors work in game - perhaps they need a new type of sliding door, for example - they now have to work around the kludge they left in there from last time, assuming that anyone even remembers it in the first place.

The fact that there are evidently performance implications regarding doors should therefore be of little surprise to anyone.

"Moreover, we have a big issue with badly spawned ships for interdiction that causes significant but unnecessary physics that delays the execution of the next frame on the main threads (and thus severely impacts frame rate)."

Here we go, a nice meaty subject. There are two parts to this:

1) Objects with physics that we don't need.
2) Multithreading delays.

The first issue is quite clear cut: due to the eldritch horrors of their frankencodebase, they're performing physics calculations on objects that do not need them. This is indicative of those systemic issues I've just described, as this sort of thing should be very, very easy to trace back to where it is occurring. Since it's not, as it should theoretically be a five minute fix in a properly designed engine, their ship spawning system can be assumed to be a rats nest of different things interacting rather than one neat, orderly, centralized thing which handles all of the necessary spawning logic.

The second simply means that the physics thread has too much work to do, which is causing the game to run slowly. It sounds simple - "hey, we just need to do less physics work, and then we'll be safely back in the 120+ FPS PC Master Race, right?!". Sadly, it is not. In fact, it describes something really, really bad for Star Citizen.

In most game engines, physics (all those math-y calculations that the computer uses to figure out whether your commando is properly standing on top of a ramp or T-posing his way into the great unknown, for example) and rendering (drawing all of those fidelitious layers of jackets, for example) happen separately. This is very important to maintaining PC Master Race membership, because it means that if too many physics things happen at once, the framerate will not drop. In a properly designed engine, you could have ten thousand commandos running into each other at once, and the game would still remain at the same framerate - the simulation would simply slow down, and everything would move in slow motion.

An easy example of this is EVE Online - there can be huge engagements that crawl along, with actions that normally take seconds taking hours, but during it all, you can still move through the game at a high framerate. This is because the simulation and rendering are decoupled, and the simulation taking longer does not slow down the rendering.

In SC, as they just described, this is not the case. This is Very, Very, Bad. If EVE Online were designed in the same way, then those enormous engagements would be completely unplayable, as the game could only render a new frame after it was done doing the simulation calculations that took an hour to do. In the meantime, the game would appear to hang, and be completely unresponsive - for all you know, it crashed. This is exactly what is currently going on in SC, just at a much smaller scale. The design is neither scalable nor sustainable, and is a really bad thing as it only works if the physics will never, ever be doing enough that it slows down rendering. Assuming that networking works perfectly tomorrow, how exactly are those capital ship battles going to play out, with this limitation in mind?

"Moreover, the team’s going to build a thread local queue to push physics commands in order to avoid synchronization cost caused by the large amount of physics parameter update calls (in order to ultimately get down to reasonable numbers again)."

This is the sentence that actually prompted me to begin writing this series, as it struck fear into my very soul.

The system they describe is fundamentally changing the manner in which commands are issued to other objects in code - in this case, related to physics.

Most code written for games is directly invoked:

Object.DoThing();

Object Does the Thing as soon as this is called. Pretty simple. But let's say that you need to Do A Thing on a different thread, such as physics. You now need to worry about how to properly synchronize data between those different threads, because in any multithreaded system, code running on one thread does not know about anything running on a different thread unless you specifically and carefully make them aware of each other.

One way of doing this is to block both threads. This works, and is easy to implement:

BlockPhysicsThread();
Object.DoPhysicsThing();
UnblockPhysicsThread();

Remember Spinlock? It's the same thing. And remember how it tanks performance? Yeah, same thing.

A queue is another programming construct which attempts to solve this issue. Internally, this creates a little note that says "hey, mr. physics thread sir, next time you get a chance, could you Do This Thing? kthxbai". Simple and elegant, and how many games handle this type of situation.

If this system was properly designed in the first place, it would be no big deal at all - all other code would have been written with that in mind. But now, they have to go back and change it in order to prevent even more bugs - or worse, outright crashes - from being created as a result.

"In addition to that, the engineers are trying to reduce the amount of items / entities / components and their updates that contribute to the high baseline cost on the client."

This is the same as previously covered - things are being updated that don't need to be. Let's explore that issue on a deeper level. A performance optimization that I have heard much about of late is distance-based culling - which is, quite simply, "don't update things that are too far away." That sounds pretty simple, right? It is. In fact, it should theoretically take about two lines of code:

if(Distance(Player, OtherThing) < WayOverThere) {
UpdateOtherThing();
}

Or at least, it should be that simple if the engine was designed for it in the first place. Since 1) it is clearly taking them months and months to do this instead of about twenty seconds, and 2) this technique is one of the simplest and most cost-effective optimizations that almost every game ever written ends up using it in some way or another, we can surmise that there is something causing a problem. What could that be?

There are a multitude of reasons as to why you can't simply bolt this on after the fact. Many of them stem from the same problem as in multithreading: there's a lot of other code that expects the code you're trying to optimize to behave one way, and changing its behavior as part of a performance optimization can introduce more bugs and crashes, or even become impossible without also changing all of the other code in some way.

Maybe you have a seemingly innocent bit of code tucked away somewhere that checks something innocuous, such as whether a chariot's lights are turned off or on so the renderer knows whether it needs to prepare some extra lighting calculations for them or not. Maybe that piece of code was hastily thrown in every ship's Update() function, because some guy came barging into your office and demanded that the lights look extra fidelitious in the next check-in, and you wanted to go home because it was already 11 PM and sleep started to look more appealing than bulletproof code design. We've all been there. Maybe this was lost in the shuffle, hidden in a tiny note in your source control commit message that you promised yourself you would fix later. Maybe later never came because someone barged into your office the next morning and insisted that you work on important logic for AI commandos to recognize mopping as their highest purpose in life.

And now, months later, someone else is desperately trying to improve performance at 10:30 PM for a big demo the next day, and tries to add in culling logic that stops calling Update() on ships that are far away. And when he compiles and runs this, he now finds that the lighting is wrong on all of the chariot's lights. Stymied, he now has to trace through all of the code that could potentially impact that. If he's lucky enough to eventually find out that tucked away UpdateStupidLightsSoICanGoHomePlz() function in a bad place, now he has to decide how to fix it. Does he properly refactor the light checking to work on the renderer's side, staying until 1 AM? Or does he pull that bit of code out and plop it into the messaging system he's been writing all day, kicking the can ever further down the road just so that he can get home at a reasonable hour such as midnight? Decisions, decisions...




This is very complex, abstract stuff, and even professionals have trouble getting it right on the first try. Software is somewhat unique in that respect, as in most other fields involving complex technical endeavors, such as building a huge skyscraper, you have the benefit of being able to touch and see it. Building a tower makes logical sense. We instinctively know how gravity works, and that a pyramid is a very strong structure and an upside-down pyramid is probably not.

But in software, we do not have that luxury. It's all abstract concepts. And while we can make fancy flow charts attempting to show relationships between pieces of code, it can often feel like the flatland problem - that we're mere 2D beings helplessly flailing about, trying to visualize 3D concepts that our poor brains simply weren't designed to handle. Software development is all about taking those abstract concepts and solidifying them into functional code.

And that code is, by design, very brittle. If everyone agrees that we're making a pyramid, and then halfway through stacking blocks to build it, someone waves their hands and insists that we're actually making an upside-down pyramid, it's probably going to fall over. And when software is poorly designed, on any level, that is exactly what happens.

Performance optimization has the worst of all worlds because it is bound by hard technical limitations. Time and money to add new features may indeed be infinite, but at the end of the day, the CPU cycles on the player's computer are very much finite.

Propagandist posted:

'Twas the night before Paarpmas, and all through the 'Verse,
Not a backer was pledging, for it just got worse

Delusions were posted on Reddit with care,
In hopes that St. Christopher soon would be there;

Citizens were nestled all snug in their beds,
While autism chariots danced in their heads

Titanic with her iceberg, and I with by bunnes,
Had just finished a season of Friends reruns

When out of the blue there came a new Tweet,
I sprang from the chair to the Warlord's drumbeat

Away to the forums I flew like a flash,
I refreshed the thread and stroked my moustache

The goons were elated, while MoMA was stunned,
For lawyers had seized their millions of funds

When, what to my wondering eyes do I see,
The Warlord himself is now claiming a V

A "washed-up developer", so salty and tart,
I knew in a moment it must be D_Smart.

More wordy than EULAs his topics they came
He tweeted, and posted, and blogged them by name:

"Now! Archer, now! Legal, now! Lesnick and Lando,
"On! Sandi, on! Zendesk, you're snowflakes, commandos!

"To the federal building! To the town city hall!
"Now litigate! Litigate! Litigate all!"

As interns that 'fore the bankruptcy will flee,
When parted with paycheck, sans college degree;

So up to the jailhouse the p'licemen they flew,
With the car full of staff - and St. Christopher too:

And then in a minute, I heard in the thread
The anger of backers was fin'lly widespread

As I refreshed the thread, and was getting right sauced
A new blog from D_Smart, so smug and aroused

He typed in all caps, was having a cow
His sources were leaking: "Apocolypse, Now!"

A bundle of links were slapp'd right at the end,
His first July blog post, "Read it!" he contends

His eyes - how they twinkled! His hairline, how thinning,
Old Greybeard had won; on his chair he sat spinning

His poo poo-eating grin displayed a bright glow,
And his message was thus: "loving told you so!"

"They switched the game's engine", he wrote with a curse.
"There is always more, and it is always worse!"

The crossed arms of he showed with an air
He cackled with glee, and leaned back in his chair

His post had that rhythm, that rhyme, and that station
"Forty-two is eighty-sixed, sweet vindication!"

But I saw him exclaim, when this fire he set alight
"Happy Paarpmas to all, and to all a good night!"

G0RF posted:

Bootcha posted:

Thankfully, you don't have glitch in order to travel to this here youtube video...

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGq4YEp8QUY (video: Sunk Cost Galaxy - Chapter 1: Past to Future to Present)

reddit posted:

Unlike Chris, I actually write code for a living, and for many years applied that in the gaming industry. I have multiple AAA titles under my belt. You won’t believe any of that, same as you won’t believe that Star Citizen has already technologically failed. But I don’t care about your beliefs beyond marveling at their lunacy. All the evidence you need is right in front of you. Go play Star Citizen! It’s always been utter unplayable poo poo and it always will be.

I would never share my whole CV for obvious reasons, but I’ve shared this one on the old RSI forums: Starsiege Tribes.
The point is, at a technical level, Star Citizen’s engine is in disastrous shape when compared with what they’re promising, and from my perspective, it’s getting worse. I want to see Star Citizen made, so I’m gonna keep speaking my mind, and defending myself when the white knights ride up on their horses and hurl their weak rear end insults from inside their echo chamber.

Spiderdrake posted:

quote:

This is the second time this year that they've grossly underestimated engagement/demand (first being the referral contest). It was promoted on the stream of their big game reveal as well as going up alongside the 3.0 release, and yet they are getting numbers that are similar to the tail end of a moderately popular release.

Interesting to compare this number to the Drake poll, which claims 37440 voters. Kinda thinking there's roughly 10k whales and then about 20k people following the game closely. Really really small community for such a "huge, ambitious project"

Dusty Lens posted:

Cao Ni Ma posted:

I swear to god if any of these guys saw EA or Activision deny a refund because they played a preorder demo of a release game that was still 4 years away they'd be all over that saying "See this is why Im backing CIG" completely unironically.

The flood of NMS refugees shouting never again while pledging into SC put the irony meter into permanent hiatus I'm afraid.

reddit posted:

This is not your normal subreddit by a long shot the outright denial of things that go wrong with this project and the lack of people being self aware is more like a cult than a fan base. Also the hate that comes from here if you talk about refunds or anything negative about the project is nothing short of toxic, although I guess fan is short for fanatic and this subreddit takes that meaning to 12.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Well I'm going to try and play 3.0 again.


20 minutes later 60% of my GPU is being used to render a black screen.

Seriously what the gently caress CIG.
This is not an alpha product. It's not a product at all. It's a collection of concepts loosely held together by prayer and lovely programming, and it has no hope of ever being anything near what Chris has marketed it to be.

He's better off settling with CryTek, selling Squadron 42 as a standalone CryEngine product, and then turning around and making a completely new engine for Star Citizen. Actually the project would be better off if they paid Chris Roberts and the rest of the executive team $10M to gently caress off and let actual competent developers finish the job (and by finish I mean start), but neither one of those are going to happen because it would require Chris to accept that he's not the savior of PC gaming and is instead a walking punchline.

Rad Russian posted:

It's also not OK to hide behind "it's alpha" in almost 2018 when the game was supposed to be delivered in 2014. Either Croberts is an incompetent manager who can't estimate project dates and he does not understand development, or he's an incompetent manager that can't execute or deliver. For Shitizens it's somehow neither and he's great at everything.

Daztek posted:

Bootcha posted:

Terrible decisions are a part of Chris Roberts history...

WHICH YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT IN THIS VIDEO WOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al8G8nHFQJo (video: Sunk Cost Galaxy - Chapter 2: The Mythological Roberts)

Bootcha posted:

quote:

Used Car Rental Salesman chat

There's a quite bit more to that story than what I mentioned, and it's a lot more depressing and sad. And more than two sources have confirmed most of the details of that sad unspoken tale.

What I said was consistent with what they said. However, yes, I should have explained that beat better.

I was looking for something not the whole sad story, not a casual "oh and here he's a car salesman", and not "oh and here he's a car salesman here's what I think about that". I'll have plenty of time for opinions soon enough.

Bootcha posted:

I hope this video is everything you dreamed it would be.

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJjQLz06ZGk (video: Sunk Cost Galaxy - Chapter 3: The Gang's All Here)

G0RF posted:

Squadron never should’ve tried to be more. It was only ever something the minority of a 700,000 member customer base wanted. And most are owed it now for free anyway.

When I picture the Squadron 42 of the original pitch, and the Squadron 42 spec’ed to the probable market size for a PC-exclusive indie space dogfighter in 2014, I picture a much leaner work that hits the nostalgia notes really hard but isn’t trying to best AAA standards across multiple game genres while also delivering the biggest moviegame in history. Whereas Star Citizen’s success seems defined by ship monetization, Squadron’s can and should’ve been in beautifully packaging up an old school nostalgia trip. It can’t possibly ever compete with Star Citizen as money printing machine, but could’ve been a good will cementer for the olds and gateway title / loss leader for that subset of younger gamers who want space pewpew for Pros. If done right, it could’ve won their hearts then turned them over to Star Citizen to win their spaceship dollahs.

Ace Combat games move in the ~1M unit range (including console sales) with dogfighting, missions and a dollop of animated scripted stuff. 6-7 hours for a single player campaign. Barring a Star Wars tie-in for consoles (like a Tie Fighter reboot), it seems to me like the market for a single-player PC only dogfighter title is a six-figure number. And again, CIG may have captured the majority already.

More than anything, SQ42 needed to be a great branched mission dogfighter + Mark Hamill nostalgia vehicle that felt familiar and fun. Chris had the team to do it. And it could’ve achieved that with a structure / scope more akin to Starlancer — a virtual carrier home-base with limited player ambulation, a briefing room, much of the cinematics piped in as video news broadcasts or HUD-delivered companion clips, etc.

Such choices would’ve been both note-perfect on the nostalgia front yet far easier on the production front. It could’ve avoided the exacting cinematic demands of a AAA title like Battlefront 2 using the structural cheats inherent in a game like Starlancer and seemed authentically old school while doing it. A win win for players and developers who know only too well the big bucks are in high-poly, higher dollar spaceship presales.

But then (surprise) Chris started yammering and yammering and somehow:

Chris Roberts posted:

We've got a really big story arch so we're going to split it into a trilogy like Wing Commander 1/2/3, that kind of thing. So Episode 1 is what people will play this year and has the equivalent of 70 Wing Commander style missions...

... We're thinking it's like 21 chapters or so, and each chapter is a segment of missions...

...So, it's about the equivalent of about 70 missions Wing Commander style and we think it's about 20 hours of gameplay...

...So, Episode 2 is "Behind Enemy Lines", which I think that everyone that backed until like $6 million gets for free and then Episode 3 would be the year after. So we'll have each one of these, each one is the equivalent of a huge triple A "Call of Duty" or better because we have a much bigger campaign.

Chris pushed expectations to “bigger than COD” levels and I’m hard pressed to believe the core backers of Squadron rest wanted / needed that. Even from the first couple of years of CIG material about Squadron, it sounded like they started with manageable targets and a familiar structure.

Yet the targets grew nuttier and nuttier as Chris’s gums flapped faster and the cash really started being lit on fire. Now it’s got to have AAA FPS missions. Now it’s got 1st & 3rd person animations that don’t cheat. Now there’s no loading screens. Now it’s got a 1200 page script. Now it’s assembled the most prestigious Hollywood cast in gaming history. Now it’s 20 hours of in-game cinematics.

All that scope creep turned it into Mission:Unprofitable.

Then a funny thing happened after Chris spent all that time talking up Wing Commander 5: The Bloatening... The vengeful god of Irony sent an Aleax of Squadron as a COD game and nut-tapped Chris so hard he put Squadron in hiding for an entire year. (The Road to CitizenCon having been contrived in advance to create the illusion of a last-minute SQ42 debut postponement when it was a foregone conclusion Chris wasn’t going to show it in the run up to Infinite Warfare’s launch because ...)

I’m strongly of the opinion that despite its “failure” to only move 14 million copies first year that Infinite Warfare actually helped force the full and permanent retreat of Sq42 from what was originally planned as a stand-alone retail release to what it appears to be in all but name today: DLC for Star Citizen. (Maybe the Crytek lawsuit was the primary driver but from Brian Chambers Batgirl comments, it almost seems like CIG thought their legal risks were behind them earlier this year.)

Whatever the primary driver, now it’s an open world “let’s put the space back in this space game” bloater damned to sharing the PG playspace, pacing, etc. with the money-earning monster that really was the only show all along.

All of those expansions / deviations from the familiar and conceivably very achievable introduced orders of magnitude greater complexity while actually reducing the chance of yielding lean, mean, retro-tastic fun, a reality made evident by the belated Squadron circa end-of-2017 reveal. Sooooo much time and space and possibility with so little to fill it or give it life or meaning thanks to Chris’s “vision.”

At this point, it’s hard not to wonder whether the real plan is to put in a good effortshow on the Squadron 42 appearances front even while its internally been consigned to the dust bin. This is of course and probably crap but the Coutts loan and Crytek lawsuit both put Squadron under unique outside duress, even while internal and external forces have long conspired to keep it constantly back-burnered. CIG testing of prospective demand via their latest mailing list signup is a suggestive tell and one wonders if, heading into year 6, they suddenly realized the marketing wisdom of a viability test for demand. Knowing that the majority of signups will already be owed the title for free, they may end up discovering only years late that a lean, mean retro-tastic approach would’ve been the smarter choice all along. Retro-tastic fun is the hip new trend with kids these days, anyway

Klyith posted:

I dunno, as always with the Crobbler there are two good explanations.

There's the one where he knows he's screwed and just wants to string it out as long as possible. That CIG has become an elaborate, legal way to scam shitizens by taking money for things they know they can't deliver. They're putting on a show with Sq42 because that's the thing they can most easily produce more glitz fakery to sell more dreams. Star Citizen the online game has kinda run it's course, they've gotten close to the MVP escape hatch.

And then there's the one where he thinks he's still a demigod producer of games and movies, and that he's not the one that's hosed everything up. In that version Crobbler has gotten frustrated by Star Citizen and is plowing himself into Sq42 because he wants some results dammit. But he is so terrible that he legit doesn't know the difference between a scripted demo and a real game.

As always, the funniest thing is that these two possibilities are indistinguishable.

G0RF posted:

POLYGON: Star Citizen’s 3.0 update is finally here
The latest update to the multiplayer game’s incomplete alpha build

quote:

Star Citizen, the ambitious collection of spacefaring games, has reached a major milestone. The latest update to the project’s online multiplayer game, the so-called “persistent universe,” represents the largest addition of new content in several years. It is now available to all backers.

The Star Citizen persistent universe (PU) is an online multiplayer game that includes space combat as well as first-person shooting. The latest update, called Alpha Patch 3.0.0, includes a number of new locations to explore, including three planet-sized moons, as well as atmospheric flight. From our preview in October:

The biggest selling point will be the procedurally generated moons, named Yela, Daymar and Cellin. The smallest of those moons will have a surface area of more than 851,000 square kilometers, which will dwarf the entire landmass of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.... Players will be able to seamlessly enter their atmosphere from orbit and fly around unimpeded by loading screens or transitions of any kind. In this way, Star Citizen will leap-frog its closest competitor, Elite: Dangerous.

(Probably copy and pasted right from a Swofford email after the PayPal transfer cleared...)

quote:

The patch also includes many quality-of-life improvements, such as enhanced cockpit interaction for pilots, 20 new missions and AI for non-player characters such as shopkeepers. The full patch notes are available on the Star Citizen website.

The Star Citizen project began with a Kickstarter campaign in 2012. Since that time, it has become the single most-funded crowdfunding campaign of any kind, on any platform, for any thing. So far, Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) say they have raised more than $174 million, with at least $15 million of that rolling in since the first week in October.

The project is not without its controversies, including several lawsuits.

At least two high-value backers recently asked for their money back. One tells Polygon that they’ve begun legal action to secure a refund of more than $25,000. Both cite delays in the progress of Star Citizen’s single-player game, called Squadron 42. That project, which has been sold separately since February 2016, features the acting talents of Gillian Anderson, Mark Hamill and Gary Oldman among others.

Crytek, makers of the CryEngine which the Star Citizen games were originally built on, is also suing RSI and CIG for copyright infringement while implying that its executives behaved unethically during and after negotiations.

It’s important to note that this Alpha Patch 3.0.0 is still just a tiny fraction of the promised feature set for Star Citizen’s multiplayer game. Neither the multiplayer nor the single-player Star Citizen games have had a release date of any kind since 2016, a fact that Roberts himself regularly acknowledges.

Way to bury the ledes.

And get out of here with that leap frog bullcrap. The game with 3 moons in one star system of a planned 100 compared to the one with a simulated galaxy... The game with only combat and cargo mechanics compare to Elite’s full suite of space sim essentials... The game with 15FPS on monster rigs next to the one that delivers 100+ And VR in ultra on equivalent rigs... The game in pre-alpha after five years next to the one released and continuously expanding... The game with no real A.I. yet versus one that’s had it since pre-release... The game facing lawsuits from multiple corners and with no transparency to backers versus the one with quarterly financial disclosures to the public... The game pitching $50 to $100 protection racket land claims as yet not in game vs. one that sells cheap cosmetics for those inclined.

Yet “Star Citizen leap frogs Elite because no loading screens.” Yeah, okay man. Whatever you say, ye paragon of games journalism.

Virtual Captain posted:

Persistent and account bound invisible character. Renders the game unplayable.

So... i spawned on Olistar, and im invisible. On the command box it appears to be missing some suit files
Im this little ball on the middle of the screen: https://i.imgur.com/AgiUSXI.jpg

Already restarted, killed myself, verified game files, redownloaded all 3.0, already login relogin, etc.... deleted user folder

Sarsapariller posted:

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/montoya_test/status/946085340032495621

quote:

Watch Montoya skillfully destroy MassivelyOp's contributors and their weak arguments against Star Citizen.

quote:

Part of my daily routine is smack down some anti-Star Citizen snowflakes, then eat a T-bone with some Miller lite. Stop judging me! I would like to make a correction! Not all the stretch goals are complete! Pets? Some landing zones.. they are way off. I apologize for making a factually incorrect statement. When somebody says something as fact, but it is not, they should apologize and make it clear that they realize what they said was wrong!

SARSAPARILLER DESTROYS AGEING SHILL WITH VIEWER COUNT IN THE TRIPLE DIGITS

Is it really "Destroying" if you have to declare victory in the title of your video? I mean, their arguments still stand and their predictions for the next year will be verified, or not, in the fullness of time. How about destroying them by making some competing predictions and seeing who's closer to being right? I wonder what kind of expectations you had for Star Citizen at this time last year- because their expectation for SC in 2017 was "Most likely to flop."

D_Smart posted:

He's a moron, and a coward. This is the Shillizen who backed out of debating (he would have been crushed, of course) me live on GameTalkLive a few weeks ago.

They're all doing disaster control, following the 3.0 disaster release.

I left him a message. I'm probably getting banned.

quote:

Were you drunk when @ 11:05 you claimed that they had met every stretch goal?

AP posted:

I can't watch Montoya, it's painful. Darwin would be fascinated by the declining numbers of Citizens, survival of the dumbest.

AP posted:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/213011256?t=57m38s
(video: WTFo and buddy talk about the salt created by 24hour holiday livestream delay)

AP posted:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/213011256?t=24m50s
(video: WTFo steals a ship but can't get out because the doors are locked)

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

big nipples big life posted:

Ben Lesnick, Developer.

Years from now, when Star Citizen comes out is but a forgotten memory, this line will still make me smile.

The Titanic posted:

Star Citizen wants to be an mmo, of which they have no groundwork set. They are significantly longer away from anything close to Elite for this feature alone. They can, of course, dump the mmo aspect and make it a small-scale arena game with friends, but I have a feeling that would be hugely negative for them at this point.

People are buying Star Citizen the mmo, with very expensive ship pre orders. There are delusions of it unseating Eve as the defacto space mmo. People put lots of dollars down to be space aces with Firefly and be like Han Solo while getting a big jump on the space poles who will join with Aurora packages.

Star Citizen, to be realized even at half of what was promised, needs to be a literal technological evolution. Just getting my NPCs aboard a star liner on a ship flying through the middle of a space war outside where marines are shooting other marines inside those ships and you can watch all this happening through the windows of your ship into the windows of another ship... is a monumental networking achievement. It can probably be done in a single player game, but add in the mmo factor and everything goes to hell pretty fast.

CIG needs too guys working on these problems, who can do more than hold up their hands and shout “meshing technology!” Somebody actually needs to build this stuff.

And this isn’t even taking into account AI or physics simulations everywhere, even at a very arbitrary and basic level. Hell, just getting a physics ball to roll the same way for everybody over a network can be a challenging thing.

I think you’re easily over a decade away from seeing even a rudimentary version of what’s been promised to gamers. The demos would need to stop happening, because it’s not actually making a game. The motion capture would need to stop because it’s useless right now, and will be outdated years later when this is able to actually release. All the “fun stuff” that doesn’t involve being neck deep in really complex code and creative solutions needs to stop. Chris Roberts would need to show real progress instead of pretending to make progress.

But that won’t ever happen, because funding would dry up. That SC is always (current + .1) versions away to meeting everybody’s wildest dreams is what keeps it all alive.

reddit posted:

So I recently got a new computer and I got Star Citizen, my frames were ok in the hangar but when I played in the SC Universe thing it was unplayable, it took a year to get out of the bed alone. So I was wondering if upgrading my RAM from 8GB to 16GB will help as long as moving the game onto a SSD.

TheLastRoboKy posted:

AP posted:

https://twitter.com/dominictarason/status/946156909723348993

I have never seen a single person here or anywhere else say this. Not even Derek has said that people livestreaming are faking it. No one needs to say this, it's loving broken garbage that runs, but on a wing (commander) and a prayer. I get that there's trying to be mature on the middle ground but holy poo poo guy we are 170 million into a game that only on rare occasions lets you put down a box.

Goosfraba posted:

Scruffpuff posted:

So my wife has caught up with the thread. She was only peripherally aware of this whole debacle through me, but for some reason she had time on her hands while I was at work, and she dove into the terrible secret of space.

She made two points.

Point 1: This has nothing to do with a space game. In her words: "I watched Chris Roberts, and he's a dork. He's a dork's dork. He looks weird, he sounds weird, he's overweight, clumsy, and socially awkward. But he made a game, made millions, got the "girl" (such as it is), has tons of adoring fans, and now he's taking on the establishment. Everything he's doing is the wet dream of every geek in the world who's considered themselves a hopeless underdog - if he can do it, so can they! And for that reason, they have to believe he can do this. Because if it turns out Chris Roberts lied - if he is a fraud - then that means he's not one of them. And that means there's no hope for them: to make the money, get the girl, and get acceptance. They'll stay in the bottom of the social bucket for the rest of their lives. So they believe."

Point 2: Derek Smart is the hardest thing about this whole thing to believe. She was ready to believe that an autistic guy who got lucky decades ago and bought his own press came back to delude himself and others to the tune of $175 million. Easy to swallow. That thousands of fans are ready to doxx and kill anyone who disagrees with the commitment of that fraud - no problem - easy to believe. What she can't believe is that one man, who has nothing to do with this, decides "I'M GOING TO BURN THIS ALL DOWN" because of a very minor slight from the con artist, and has tirelessly committed literal years of his life with no rest to doing exactly that, like a down-syndrome terminator.

G0RF posted:

this is all so great.

Your wife is dead-on about Chris’s appeal to the fanboys. For the older ones, the ones who upon whom Wing Commander made so powerful an emotional impact due to the timing quirks of their own young, “I want to fly spaceships and have adventures!” impressionability and Chris’s serendipitously timed arrival at exactly the right studio and exactly the right moment, there’s an additional element of deep emotional gratitude. The longing to see this fun wizard of their childhood thrive because they’re thankful for the feelings / memories / escape his games gave them is reinforced and fortified by Chris Roberts’s accessibility and personal affability. His availability to fans at these events rewards and reinforces that gratitude. His generosity of spirit in such instances is pretty real; you can see it in fan photos where Chris has HIS arm around the fans’ shoulders and the big goofy “meet my best bud” smile in the photos he’s taking with random customers. There’s an intimacy there that you’d never see with a lot of other big names in gaming and it’s meaningful. An ego-gratifying symbiosis with real power.

For Roberts, who really has had a roller-coaster life with seasons of famine and of feasting, having the reinforcements of rock star adulation is surely a balm for the soul. Given his wife’s own unmistakeable disinterest in the industry and her discounting of the significance of Wing Commander in its historical context, the deep admiring validation that erupts from the fanboys probably carries extra power. If there was a /fanboysmirin subreddit, Chris and the citizenry would dominate it from all the moments of earnest affection exchanged.

I don’t say that disparagingly, I think it’s actually something Chris does right and with largely authentic warmth. Shame about the lying and mercenary fleecing but hey, nobody’s perfect! :/

Republicanus posted:

Good afternoon to all the SC fans furiously posting about some lone critic on twitter and Goons "ruining everything"

I want you all to know who you are railing against, at least in part. You should know that Goons are not monolithic in any real sense of the word.

Let me tell you a little Star Wars Galaxies story. I supplied bounty hunters with thousands of exploding droids optimized to knock out jedi because it was hilarious to watch people randomly get exploded by residential landmines.

We were very successful at humor. We made bank because we found funny ways to screw with other players.

With that as a preface, let me tell you God's honest truth. You guys are not only hilariously fanatical about Star Citizen, you are also loathsome. You'll probably even get a bunch of old EVE Goons planning poo poo for you if CIG ever decides to release Star Citizen the MMO-thing.

You are a wonderful bunch of targets. This is not going to change. This is something you should realize and see how it supports nearly all of the posting we do on our Stupid Crowdfunding Accomplishment Mausoleum subforum - you guys are worthy of our attention because you are remarkable sperglords. You deserve to be griefed.

We want to laugh so hard at the crushing of your dreams - either through the failure of CIG/RSI's ability to stay open, or to finally get this pile out the door in a manner that can handle thirty or more players - because I want to buy in and make a business out of griefing every one of you until you quit in a snot-bubble-blowing rage.
I want the game to come out with enough mechanics to kick your rear end. You should pray they bring back the PvP-slider idea.

We need a good laugh. Everyday Star Citizen still isn't done is almost as funny as stealing your Mustang-LX-superhyper-variant.

PS> We do ruin everything - for laughs.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

UNCUT PHILISTINE posted:

The thing that blows my mind isn't that there's bugs-- because the statement by itself "Alpha builds are buggy" isn't wrong-- it's the sheer variety and critical nature of every single one of them. It is loving rotten from top to bottom.

Exactly. This is not an alpha product. It's not a product at all. It's a collection of concepts loosely held together by prayer and lovely programming, and it has no hope of ever being anything near what Chris has marketed it to be.

He's better off settling with CryTek, selling Squadron 42 as a standalone CryEngine product, and then turning around and making a completely new engine for Star Citizen. Actually the project would be better off if they paid Chris Roberts and the rest of the executive team $10M to gently caress off and let actual competent developers finish the job (and by finish I mean start), but neither one of those are going to happen because it would require Chris to accept that he's not the savior of PC gaming and is instead a walking punchline.

ewe2 posted:

Remix!



* lyrics if by some chance you totally ignored them the first time.
* It's a remix in the sense that I did it again slightly differently.
* By slightly, I mean not very muchly.
* Remember, its not paranoia if they're out to get you.

ewe2 posted:

It's a new year. Let's bring everyone really down. thatguy suggested this parody and suppled most of the lyrics.



* lyrics by thatguy with additions/changes by ewe2
* Fitter Happer made today would just be a treated scream.
* happy 2018 buster.

G0RF posted:

I don't know that I ever dropped this into the thread but in doing some hard drive clean-up I came back across it and figured it would be worth sharing. It's an excerpt from a pretentious, unfinished multi-chapter monsterpost called "The Malaise" that futzed about with Social Science, Marketing Theory, and Fundamentals of Game Design. Much of which is common-sense to most here but still seemed worth putting down for the newer visitors.

This part, "The Chasm", shameless archer-propriated Geoffrey Moore's model of technology adoption from "Crossing the Chasm" towards gaming industry audiences / crowdfunded MMOs in particular. It's just theorycrafted analysis with the power of CHARTS to lend the appearance of empirical rigor, but I liked parts of it.

Anyway...

---

THE CHASM

Cloud Imperium Games shattered crowdfunding records through the largesse of an oddball confederation of space sim enthusiasts, hardcore dogfighting fans, PC master racers, compulsive collectors, mid-life crisiseers, and gray market profiteers. In this peculiar strain of a technology adoption curve, they are the Innovators and Early Adopters -- that early, energetic, bump on the port side of the bell.

A little over 750,000 strong by true count, they are the purest Star Citizens that will ever be. Longsuffering and generous, credulous beyond reason, they are devotees of Chris Roberts more than customers of Cloud Imperium at heart. And he has captured the most generous of them, wholly and devotedly, with fictions he himself falsifies constantly, would that they could but turn their ecstatic gaze from his imagined future to behold his factual past, from the honeyed promises of his lips to the clumsy works of his hands.

Yet however firm his hold over the Early Adopters, however efficient his methods for extracting the cash of the Innovators, they are but a fraction of the true potential market for an online game. Across the chasm lies the real prize, the mainstream gamer audience.



Less affluent, less tribal, the "the filthy casuals" of the Gaming MMO Mainstream number in the tens of millions. They have no nostalgic attachments to the halcyon days of Wing Commander; like as not they remember it as a crappy Chris Roberts movie than a pivotal Chris Roberts game franchise. Their tastes are fickle, their loyalties quickly depreciating assets that must be constantly renewed and are never fully owned. Most don't even own PCs that could play a truly high fidelity game and never will. Many will play happily only on consoles.

Most are immune to Roberts' lures for they hold firm to credos that reject them, "Avoid early access" and "Never pre-order." They look askew at the cynical monetization tactics of AAA publishers who might seek $100 to unlock what they could easily deliver for free. They reject the "pay to win" models that enslave others then reward them with illusions of outsized power in MMOs.

The base tastes and playstyles of the “filthy casuals” who compromise the mainstream gamer population are largely held in derision and contempt by the population Roberts has amassed. Roberts himself has catered to their elitist self-narratives from the earliest hours of his pitch. Yet despite the lip service to the PC Master Racers, Roberts himself knows no such purism. He covets the mainstream masses across the chasm and expects them to follow in the fullness of time as they did before, when the PC Gaming market was young, minuscule and delighted with his offerings.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-04-22-chris-roberts-how-incredible-community-transforms-development

quote:

Roberts continued, "My gut sense is that 5 to 10 percent of your audience is going to back you early, and I think that number is variable based on the quality. When you do something really good, it's a lower percentage; if you do something that isn't so good maybe it's 20 percent or 30 percent. I'm assuming if I deliver the game I think I'm going to deliver, if it holds up to the level of Wing Commander or Freelancer or Privateer, I think 10x would be a pretty conservative number. I think that would be right in there with what I did in the '90s. What crowdfunding has proven is that those people are still out there."

Alas, if only the sound marketing instincts of his gut could prevail over the self-defeating impulses of his ego.

Putting aside their psychographic tendencies and preferred gaming platforms, there is a far simpler reason why Chris Roberts will struggle to capture the mainstream gamer market: they prefer games that are fun, and Chris Roberts is disinterested in making them.

Behold, his vision of "tactical FPS", and consider how far short it falls not just of the modern FPS but of the earliest entries in the genre.

Behold, his abandoned plans for an Ender's Game Battle Arena, in contrast to one playable now in VR.

Behold, his attempts at a Space Racing experience, and what as busy misery of poorly thought out overdesign its race track is.

Behold, his notion of MMO Mission Design, which asks players to flip switches on and off in some parody of a game loop. Or his future vision of it, which demands 8 minutes of idle running or flying to achieve 20 seconds of hot switch-flipping action. A feature, not a bug, of a realism bias so pervasive that it all but eliminates the possibility of general purpose “get in get out fun” that defines most modern MMO successes.

The commitment to drudgery by design so typical of simulators and often especially Space Sims is the resignation to a niche, but in Chris’s case it may mean a vexing future spent staring hopelessly across the chasm wondering why he couldn’t cross it. A future frustratedly unaware that he himself designed it that way with misguided development priorities, poor game design choices, indifference to the mechanics of play and most especially hostility towards conventional definitions of Fun.

Object lessons abound in the gaming industry, would that he wanted to learn from them. There are studios aplenty who captured the Innovators and Early Adopters in their market yet took nothing for granted when it came to continuing growth. They saw themselves approaching the chasm and set about the difficult problem-solving effort to devise ways to cross it, even though doing so always costs you the good will and patronage of some of your purist early fans. Behold, the Price of Freedom.

Once these companies were fledglings, now they are behemoths. Rockstar declared from their very inception that their goal was to create games for more than nerds and kids. Valve saw the need for a user-friendly software distribution platform. Bethesda turned from the PC fantasy game enthusiasts to the console market with Morrowind and scored a top 10 seller, then captured even larger audiences with the streamlined Oblivion and Fallout 3 before creating a certified monster hit with Skyrim. Some in industry were shocked that a genre formerly assumed a fixed-cap niche could become a massive mainstream success, yet Bethesda didn’t cross the chasm by accident. They’d been building a bridge there for years.

So many of the giants of our time turned from to niches to riches because they saw as self-evident what Roberts still can’t discern; that the masses they desired would not be reached by fiat or accident. It would take humility, focus, years of purposeful bridge building, and no shortage of luck, because in the end the masses do not come easily like the niches so often do. If you want them, you have to go get them, and if you're not bearing Fun when you try, then you shouldn't even bother, because they sure as hell won't.

kilus aof posted:

Also no mention of many players being unable to launch the game and among those they do many play for hours on end without being able to complete basic fedex quests. No mention of frequent crashes which wipe out ships often meaning players with basic packages have to wait for a 30 minute timer to countdown to play again.

How dare you mock the joys of Chris’s Fedex quests; they completely leapfrog Elite’s!

illectro posted:

I love the fact that I can post unfiltered SC gameplay and simultaneously be accused of being a paid RSI shill and Derek Smart troll.

The game speaks for itself right now, but different people are getting different messages.

I’m actually surprised that despite the myriad of bugs and performance issues it is stable and not crashing as often as it used to, which I guess is damming with faint praise.

Mr.Tophat posted:

Chris awaits the accountant's final measure of the books with trepidation. "You are bankrupt," the account says slowly as he places a mug to his lips and sips thoughtfully. Chris' face is aghast, all manner of horrors playing upon his features as the dreams shatter and everything turns to FUD.

The mug is placed down, and the accountant says, "morally."

Chris wipes his face with flapping hands and rises to his feet, "So you're saying we can sell the tanks? Is that what you're saying?"

Mr.Tophat posted:

"Did you hear that?" Derek asks, "I was right!"

A few moments as the warlord awaits a reply from the caverns.

"Did you hear that," a voice calls, and the warlord broadly smiles as he hears, "I was right!"

Thus we have the most open blog development seen in it's rawest form, endless, self sustaining, self serving, self parodying, self defeating, for all time. The only way we will get him free from those caverns is to lure him out with a visage of a clown which will interrupt the cycle...briefly.

Mr.Tophat posted:

Chris Roberts having to explain to a shitizen what the outcome of the Crytek lawsuit means

Mr.Tophat posted:

"For wasting the time of everyone for a period lasting longer than two weeks, Mister Smart, I am hereby sentancing you to an unusual and perhaps cruel punishment. While you are indeed correct that Chris Roberts and those associated within him and his enterprise did attempt and in large parts succeed to dupe and con their audience, you have done much to frustrate those who would seek entertainment and satisfaction from this entire debacle. I sentence you to spend fourteen days in isolation, in a specially designed cell which has absolutely no echo and a gramophone."

Derek blinks three times before the question is asked.

"What's with the gramophone your honour?"

The judge smiles warmly, almost sympathetically as he leans in to explain, "How else are we going to play that broken record?"

ComfyPants posted:

With the increasing jank that Star Citizen piles on, it seems that we've all come full circle. It's only fair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J377tKsMF0I
Worth Clicking: (video: CHRIS ROBERTS' DESKTOP COMMANDER)

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/listening2day/status/946465216388218880

DapperDon posted:

AP posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ37Dqpl-rg&t=84s (video: Cringy Concierge Citizen gets brushed off by CIG's video producers and hates on Spectrum/CIG's business practices)

Oh my god. I forced myself to listen to that whole thing and it was just one long cringefest. The face I created in my mind of what this guy looked like when he was making this rant are still making my sides hurt. HOW do you come across these things?

Mne nravitsya posted:

G0RF posted:

Oh dear, Charlie Hall is taking a break from telling readers about how Star Citizen is leap-frogging Elite and actually describing his player experience with 3.0. It actually makes for good reading in places, though the deferential interjections seem tonally incongruent.

Easy on the big words there friend! Otherwise, when the paywall drops, the citizens are not going to be able to read and understand what you are trying to say.

Truga posted:

The Saddest Robot posted:

I was watching a presentation from the some of the DICE artists and there was this slide.



I was going to make a line for star citizen but I have no idea how long it takes them to make an asset.

it's exactly the same, but replace days with years

Latin Pheonix posted:

So it looks like some people on Reddit have pinpointed the reason (or, at least, one of the reasons) that FPS tanks way worse than even Star Citizen's lovely engine should tank. It turns out that if you have a ship in flight-ready mode, full of cargo and open one of the cargo doors the server shits itself and FPS drops to single digit numbers for everyone.

Looks like this bug is repeatable quite easily:

quote:

Same thing happened to me in a fully loaded Cat. While landed and shut down you could run trough the cargo compartments filled with cargo with 25fps... Once i went to flight ready, it instantly dropped to 5 as I opened the door to the first compartment.

Beet Wagon posted:

Happy New Year, Goonailures. My gift to you is a(nother) bad video, featuring Kayak and dead-faced spacemans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZDoqAk0Mio (video: Beet plays with doggo waiting for SC to load. Uninstalls after ship fails to spawn)

TheAgent posted:

btw I spent today and tonight showing PSVR to people who have never, ever played VR and one of the gals on RE7 started freaking out and I was like "ok I got this, I beat this before" and I freaked the gently caress out too because holy poo poo in VR that poo poo is loving scary as hell

two of the people over used to work on SC but even after prodding would not say a single. fuckin. word about anything. and they were the ones talkin smack back at the fair just a few months ago. and my gal is so loving sick of goddamn star citizen, so when I brought it up she's like "why don't you and chris roberts and derek smart all go gently caress each other in the spa with your spaceships" and I thought to myself
hmmm, okay

so derek and chris, who I know both read the thread at this point (yes, chris roberts gets updates on this thread, seriously, no lols), let's all go for a steamy interracial three way in my hot tub some night

TheAgent posted:

fyi from what I've been hearing in hushed tones, chris is loving livid with bootcha, beer and this entire thread

although weirdly not upset with derek anymore, so uh

take that for what its worth I guess

TheAgent posted:

G0RF posted:

I hope you can use a variant of the line ”People who buy lots of spaceships aren’t stupid.” in there somewhere. Ben Lesnick, Master of Ships.

theres a lot of benny in here

thatguy posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

No joke its time to crowdfund TheAgent's liquor cabinet.

One of the few expenses that can eclipse Roberts' dreams.

Beet Wagon posted:

I have no loving words

https://clips-media-assets.twitch.tv/AT-169506810-1280x720.mp4#t=0

(video: player fiddles with ship controls 20ft away, reddit investigators say this is only cosmetic)

G0RF posted:

Oh dear, Charlie Hall is taking a break from telling readers about how Star Citizen is leap-frogging Elite and actually describing his player experience with 3.0. It actually makes for good reading in places, though the deferential interjections seem tonally incongruent.

POLYGON: Star Citizen’s bugs will get you killed

quote:

How I crashed into a planet at 1,500 kilometers per hour

With the release of Alpha Patch 3.0.0, Star Citizen’s persistent universe (PU) has received a major upgrade. After a few hours with the latest build, it’s very clearly still a work-in-progress. New features like atmospheric flight set the game apart from its peers, both in the fidelity of the experience and in the science fiction that underlies it. But a poor user interface and pernicious bugs make it incredibly frustrating to play.

The Alpha Patch adds three new, planet-sized moons to the game and, along with them, the ability to perform planetary landings. Figuring out how to get from point A to point B took quite a bit of work. Here’s what I’ve been able to figure out so far.

When you drop into the PU, you’re placed on board the Port Olisar space station, above the planet Crusader. The planet’s three new moons — Yela, Daymar and Cellin — are tens of thousands of kilometers away. To reach one, you first need to open up your MobiGlas, which is a holographic menu system that you project from your left wrist. It’s cool, but also unnecessarily complicated. The color choices and various bugs in the display mean you can hardly read it at times. Nevertheless, you use the mouse and keyboard to manipulate a holographic map in front of you, choose a destination and then hop in your ship.

But let’s say that that you want to go to the moon Cellin, and it’s on the other side of Crusader from you. You obviously can’t fly a straight line from Port Olisar to Cellin without crashing into Crusader.

Also, since the game is nowhere near finished, Crusader hasn’t actually been built yet.

Instead, you have to travel between a series of navigational beacons that sit in high orbit around Crusader. Once you move to the right beacon, the planet is no longer in the way, and you’ll be able to plot a straight line to Cellin.

Movement from beacon to beacon is accomplished via your ship’s quantum drive. It folds the space in front of your ship and allows you to travel at about one-fifth the speed of light. That means the hop from Port Olisar to the correct navigational beacon only takes a few seconds. Once Crusader is out of the way, it’s only a few seconds more until you’re in orbit over Cellin.

Here’s where things get a little screwy.

Let’s say that you want to reach a particular point on Cellin, like a mine or a farm. They’re scattered all around the surface of the planet, and each of them shows up as a blue square on your heads-up display along with its linear distance from your ship. But some of those locations will be on the other side of the moon from you. Right now, there’s no indication that they are.

Bugs we encountered

We found several challenging bugs in Alpha Patch 3.0.0. First off, the implementation of TrackIR support is not ideal. The view floats around, even with a large dead zone, and requires a reset of the system’s center point every minute or so. I’ve resorted to flying without it for now.

The issues with the UI overall were most troubling. At times, the in-cockpit HUD would fail to display and I had to switch back and forth between third-person and first-person views to get it to show up at all. The MobiGlas menu was difficult to read when backlit by the dashboard display in some ships, and it seemed to change brightness at times.

The most challenging bug was a ghosted image of the MobiGlas that remained in my field of view, no matter what I did. It seemed to be complicated by the shadows being cast by Crusader’s central star. The only solution was to reboot the game entirely, losing any progress that I’d made.

Of the six times that I closed it, the program crashed five times and required me to manually kill it through Windows Task Manager. ()

All of these bugs were found, with evidence of them being repeatable either in part or in whole, on the Star Citizen bug-tracking system.

I flew into Cellin at 1,500 kilometers per hour before I figured that out.

The workaround is that pilots must use dead reckoning to guess if the point of interest they want to visit is on the hemisphere that they’re facing, and then use Cellin’s own set of navigational beacons to move to the correct side of the moon and begin their descent.

What’s frustrating is that, outside of using a ship’s quantum drive, spaceflight is relatively slow, given the distances involved. Elite: Dangerous solves this problem with an in-between speed, called supercruise, that lets you orbit a planet relatively quickly. But in Star Citizen quantum flight and navigational beacons is the only way to go. It’s an in-fiction choice, and one that makes gameplay dramatically different.

Back to my two crash landings.

I was aiming at a landing point that was on the other side of the planet from me. That was clearly a mistake, but one that was very easy to make. As I began my descent, I had some 800 kilometers to go, so I pegged the throttle at about 1,500 kph and sat back.

Minutes passed, and my concentration drifted.

When I looked back at my screen, my HUD was telling me that I had another 300 kilometers or so to go. But the ground completely filled my view. I became disoriented and unsure of where my horizon was.

Cellin is basically a barren wasteland. With no points of reference like buildings, cities, rivers or towns, it was difficult to tell just how close the ground I was. Imagine standing in a perfectly white room and running at a plain white wall at full speed, and you’ll begin to understand the dangers involved.

The first time it happened, I died on impact. The second time, I bounced.

My second crash. I thought I had another 500 kilometers to go. The mountain range I was looking at turned out to be a series of low hills. The bounce was unexpected, and likely a bug. (There’s a lot of that going around, friend...)

Losing the horizon and misjudging your distance from objects like the ground and mountains is a big danger for real-world pilots. Becoming “instrument rated” is therefore a big step in the life of a budding pilot, as it means that you have the skills and the experience necessary to use the instrumentation there in the cockpit to keep yourself and your passengers safe. (Ya ever heard the story of the pilot who could land a plane in real life but couldn’t land a ship in Star Citizen, Charlie? Good times!)

Right now, Star Citizen’s other features, including its instrumentation, are both incomplete and buggy. That makes flying ships close to the surface much harder than it should be.

Testing the Alpha Patch was further evidence that the team at Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games could stand to focus a bit more on the basics of flight. To me, the joy of a spaceflight simulation is the joy of maneuver. If you’re not having any fun simply flying the ship around, then you’re not having any fun at all.

You know, when you stop and think about it, if the core mechanic in your $175 million Space Sim is a frustratingly-designed funkiller after five years, maybe - just maybe - Star Citizen is bad?

Imagine that gnawing feeling in your stomach if you’re a game journalist whose been hyping a dumpster fire for years... Your commitment to the defense was such that you planned even to dox the evil goon in the wheelchair who dared fight for and win a refund...

...but then a couple years later it slowly dawns on you that maybe the biggest publicly funding gaming project in history is actually bad by design, hopelessly behind, beset by potentially existentially fatal lawsuits, and maybe even on target to be THE BIG ONE, the disaster that makes everything from E.T. to Daikatana to Duke Nukem Forever all look like amateur hour botches... so maybe refunds actually were morally justified. Maybe the critics you saw as bad guys actually had a point all along, and you had the power and the platform to have said the same. You could’ve served the public interest in the process but you just couldn’t see what it was even though that was technically your job and it was standing right in front of you like some idiot colossus, staring you in the face.

There’s no shame in reassessing one’s possession when you find yourself on the wrong side of the good. You can still think Derek is a big obnoxious blowhard, and that some of the trolls are too vicious, and that the failures of the project were scope, skill, design and project management ones instead of systematic scamming of the most pathological kind. There’s lots of room for nuance on the right side against a wrong — you just have to get there before you can find it.

SelenicMartian posted:

So, i decided to watch the director commentary version.

'This is, you know, a more full version of the AI system we call subsumption,' says Chris showing people sitting on bunk beds.

Then they bullshit for a minute that the AI doesn't always do the exact same actions.

'our first example of our sort of fluid conversation system'

'you sort of see the subtlety'

'Just a reminder this is a life capture off of of... we're not faking anything, you know. Just because we were gonna pre-record this doesn't mean we were gonna fake of fix time step or... uhherr... do anything that you wound ne- normally do in a game capture just to kind of make everything look perfect'

SelenicMartian posted:

And how the gently caress did I miss the protagonist having a hiccup every time he gets a weapon

https://i.imgur.com/lNuqsc1.mp4

SelenicMartian posted:

Holy poo poo The scene at the hangar when the prisoners arrive.

Chris: 'And here we just...' ALL PEOPLE ON DECK DESPAWN AND SPAWN IN DIFFERENT PLACES '...we know what's happening, so...uhh'

SelenicMartian posted:

Subtlety, motherfuckers!





This is happening during carrier take-off, a thing present in crobbler's games since WC1

SelenicMartian posted:

'you saw some gingering on the landing gear because it's all physicalised and there's sort of... there's conflict between the animation and the actual physics simulation... which is all stuff we'll dial in and it won't be there in the final run, but it's still early stages'

When Chris dials in the subtleties the won't be there either.

SelenicMartian posted:

'That's a combination of a couple of NPC faces plus one of our HR... our HR directors' geometry.'
They proceed to compliment the actress whose name they can't remember.

How many H.R. Directors do they have?

SelenicMartian posted:

Chris promises Batman-style scanning later on.

Remember some people posted a blurry monkey enemy pilot shot here during the stream? It's even better in motion.

Virtual Captain posted:

SelenicMartian posted:

'the whole story is fluidly *** from your point of view and again, no loading screens, no canned animation while you go to the next level' they say as they switch form the third-person camera to the first-person view of a clearly different take

https://i.imgur.com/9l4E7V3.mp4

Oh wow I missed that live. video timestamp: 48:17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcHAfaQh3QE&t=2896s

Erenthal posted:

it reminds me of the directors commentary that you could activate in half-life 2, and how they explained the neat tricks and psychological methods they used to ensure that the player always looked in the right direction when something cool happened

this is the complete opposite

Zzr posted:

I hope B'Tak reads the thread. Because I'm coming for you.

Are you happy with your land protected by UUEEC ? Do you like their fast response ? I'll just come crash a ship from orbit and make your 16x16 a crater.
Or maybe you were just mining that time, I'll just come at you yelling "train to zone train to zone" EQ style, with a horde of pirates NPC ready to aggro anyone.
Or I'll just fit my firefly with cloak and vanish when you are in their aggro range.
When you are dead and after your third crash you'll finally be able to get out of your bed, I'll be behind the door.
I'll follow you and be ahead of you when you command your new ship.
I'll be in the pilot seat when you enter your submarine, and 10 seconds later we will both be crashed into the starport, making you a criminal having to serve your time.
When you get out of jail and want to mix yourself a relaxing drink, you'll only discover that the lemon juice was my piss.
When you crawl to the toilet to puke, but it will have overflown because the guy you hired to clean it was me.

Put your pvp slider to 0 and I'll still be here for you B'Tak. Come into the space B'Tak.

G0RF posted:

If only CIG’s Community Management team had thought of this before. I guess the Intern That Reads This Thread didn’t pass those tips along two years ago for some reason.

I don’t get it, Intern... You read it. Lots of your coworkers did, too — I heard back from some. They, too, were horrified at how terrible your community could be and how poorly your team handled Community Management. So what happened?

G0RF posted:

If you think your biggest enemies are trolls or goons, or your biggest problems are making sure you delete any incriminating evidence you left behind on some old video archive your backers paid for, you really aren't paying close enough attention.

Your biggest enemies-- particularly right now-- are the toxic zealots who have already backed your game and, in absence of a game to play, have decided to role play as Riot Cops beating down anybody who looks askew at their beloved (fictive) super-game. This pattern repeats daily in more places than any of us can count. On Twitter, Youtube comments, Facebook pages, Gaming Media article comments, Reddit, and elsewhere.

Where did they learn and perfect this odious art, you wonder? Why, the RSI forums, of course!

THE PROBLEM, IN SUMMARY:

You have stated your intention to "take the pressure off backers to keep funding the game" by focusing your efforts on winning newer backers to the cause. This is a sensible strategy, at least on its surface, yet the proposition is going to be bloody difficult if:

1) The game is buggy, confusing, and unfun to play.
2) The tutorial is broken.
3) The community is hostile to new players who state that either or both of the above is true.

THE SOLUTION, IN SUMMARY:

You, the Community and Marketing Team, do not have the power to fix what is wrong with the game, or accelerate the development of its improvement. You do, however, have useful tools to combat this problem. There are good-hearted, patient members in your community, trying their level best to help win new converts to the fold. And not all of them are motivated by your cynical referral program carrot.

You are fortunate in that respect. They still love you, for reasons beyond our understanding.

Because of that, you need to:

1) EMPOWER AND ELEVATE THE GOOD GUYS --- they are the best tools in your arsenal in what will be a difficult new season of your life. Elevate their stature, and start taking a harder line approach with that part of your backer base that truly is the enemy within. If the game was not the mess that it is, then this particular issue would not be of such urgent priority. You, the Community and Marketing leadership, may have no power over the pace and quality of development, but you have a lot of tools at your disposal for changing the discourse in your own community.

2) PRIORITIZE NEW PLAYER EDUCATION VIDEOS -- Instead of doing yet another weekly show (the newest of which is apparently about Space Plants), you should focus on weekly programming aimed at educating non-players about the game and educating current players about the importance of welcoming any and all questions that non-players may have. Right now, some members of your own community are doing this for you, because they recognize the need is great, but it's YOUR GAME, and you need to do this for yourself.

3) FIX THE drat TUTORIAL - Tell Chris that fixing the Tutorial is a five-alarm fire and needs developer attention immediately. Pull five guys off their 4th revamp of a spinning space chair remodel and have them make a tutorial that doesn't suck.

4) DON'T JUST DISCOURAGE TOXIC BACKERS, PUNISH THEM -- Lando and Ben showed some encouraging signs in a recent Reverse the Verse, asking the community not to insult or argue with people. But an offhand comment in a show seen by maybe 1000 viewers is not enough. You need to make examples of the toxic losers who stand amongst the Welcome Committees with their guns out, ready to fire endless lobs of "You're an idiot", "You don't understand Game development", "This is an ALPHA, rear end in a top hat!" at your next potential wave of customers. You have seen it play out countless times, as surely as we have. You need to start doing something about it.

5) REFRESH YOUR PUBLIC PERSONA BY ELEVATING NEW FACES - Ben and Sandi, I'm sorry to break the news to you, but each of you have lost credibility with the fanbase over the last year, for very different reasons. The rapturous reception of Sean Tracy by "Reverse the Verse" viewers is telling you something-- that a straight-talking and informed developer actually talking about the true state of the game is like manna from heaven to a starving people wandering the desert looking for the Promised Land. You could regain some goodwill with an increasingly restive population by replacing yourselves with Sean Tracy and Cherie Heiberg. Ben, you come across as Uninformed and Sandi, you come across as Disinterested. Sean and Cherie are very informed, very interested and, in contrast to you both, they seem trustworthy, too. If you want to change the tone (and you bloody well should), it starts with replacing them mouthpieces.

-----

I recognize that this is constructive criticism, and will likely be seen as presumptuous and disingenuous, considering that it came from Something Awful. You seem far more likely to take action to our posts when you find us delighting in some smoking gun you've left buried somewhere that you need to track down and throw into the ocean.

Yet it is offered sincerely, and the advice is sound. Do not let 'director of spaceships' titles earned through sycophancy deafen you, Ben. Do not let your excessive self-regard as a Marketing Genius blind you, Sandi. Let neither your cash reserves nor past successes delude you about the present realities. There's a chill in the air now, guys, and it's not just the weather changing, it is the season.

1) If Citizens of the Stars is your answer, Ima give you a C-. For effort. There are some nice guys out there for sure — Baron, Bored, Gheesling, and that streamer SuperNerdGuy or something (I can’t remember his exact handle but he’s GReAT and even handles trolls/goons like a champ) — but you need a programmatic approach. And by “programmatic” I don’t mean “you need to put them in your silly YouTube programming.”

2) A big fat “F”, as in Fat. You’ve put out over 100 videos in that time and hardly a one of them does that which is most critical, seeing as as how your Marketing Leadership spoke of “taking the pressure of current backers” and getting new ones in.

3)

4) Another “F”. Well, I guess given the toxicity of your Orwellian moderation staff, this was kind of a big ask. But the stupidity of driving out even mild critics and curbstomping dissent over the years while nodding approvingly as toxic acolytes like AgentMothman and StupidQuestionBot took the same fight to reddit has turned those you could’ve easily won back into yet more exiles and enemies who are more than happy to spread motivated dissent elsewhere, anywhere. Congrats on the Balkanization and I hope you’re enjoying seeing the subject of your game always, always, ALWAYS provoke angry endless debates anywhere and everywhere.

5) How about a D, as in “Dammit you blew this, too.” Well, you finally sidelined the world’s biggest Chris Roberts fanboy, then you replaced him with another turbo-suck-up. I guess neckbeard cultivation is a demographic strategy or something? Replacing Ben with Lando was nearly zero sum, but it hardly matters when you’ve left the person least interested in your game, gaming in general, or even work in general actually sitting in the co-host seat the whole time. Even a lot of your core backers are sick of her, CIG. Sick of her disinterest, he spotlight hogging, her undisguised pursuit of an unsuccessful acting career, her Star Kitten Referral Program strokes of genius, her fake persona and feigned sincerity and all the rest that comes with her. She needs to be free to pursue her great passion full time, for she has so much more to give that will end up on figurative cutting room floors. She has long proven prodigious at this, so why not tap into the wisdom of a dozen unnamed editors out there and put her on your cutting room floor by now?

I don’t even know who to suggest as replacements since Sean is going on NewEgg shows parroting Chris’s malarkey about how huge the game is. He’s still beloved though, trusted and has a friendly “authentic” personality that comes across well on screen. And you need seemingly authentic personalities as your public faces. Lando feels fake and glib and dear lord people have had more than their fill of that by now!

Cherie is great yet you plopped her on your worst show of all and have her stuck reading Lore most of the time. See how much happier and more natural people are when they’re interacting with other and not stuck reading theorycrafted fictions that would take a century to actually get in game?

She knows the game far better than the VP of Marketing and is 1000x more natural and warm, and I’d still suggest she’s got exactly the kind of “adorkable” persona that is so battletested and reliable in video game promotion that it is seen as obligatory everywhere else, save for the fact that your backer base has enough creeps and windowlickers in it that maybe she’d be safer hidden from view completely. (But whether you elevate her or someone like her, you need to retire the Terminatrix.)

Yet still, if she had even the slight willingness to take on the role, you’d win a LOT of goodwill because she is adored for her goofy fun smart personality. Look at the gentler YouTube comments and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

quote:

“Maybe she didn't win the competition, but she won my heart.”

“I’m a simple man, I see cherie's name, i click on the video. That woman is amazing.”

“Cherie has such a sweet smile..... ”

“only clicked on this for Cherie.”

“(everybody skipping to the Cherie part XD)”

“1.) I'll totally admit I watched this 99% for Cherie. She's ridiculously cute, in every way. I've never had such a dev crush in my life.”

“Ah, mon Cherie!”

“cant wait cherie is always great to watch always soo cheerful lol”

“The Jeremiah bit at the very end was great. And I love that the whole community team is in on this stuff...and who doesn't love Cherie? Great episode.”

The market is telling you something. Loudly. Repeatedly. Plainly.

“Are you there, CIG? It’s me, Market.”

LISTEN to it for a change.

Whoever you get, you need new faces, stat. This is so obvious and you actually could rejuvenate an exhausted formula by cycling out the faker brigade Sandi leads and putting in some actual male and female human beings who love gaming in general and YOUR game in particular.

All of this sound, obvious advice is sure to be ignored yet again in the relentless repetition of the self-interested and self-defeating. So I look forward to more, and worse, for as long as possible. Keep doing what you’re doing!

G0RF posted:

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

G0RF I love you buddy but we both know CIG has a better chance of releasing Star Citizen with critical acclaim than ever listening to a soul about how they act in public.

GORF:
“But I thought if I Effortposted enough I could effect positive change!”

BEER:
“Who taught you how to do that?! WHO?!”

GORF:
“I learned it from YOU, Beer!!”
(Tears, muffled whispering)
“I learned it from you...”

Freeze frame. Slow zoom to Beer.

V.O.
“Heretics who write effort posts... inspires skeptics who write effortposts.”

Scruffpuff posted:

Pac-Man designed by Chris Roberts wouldn't have pellets, a maze, or ghosts, just a disc janking randomly around a black screen. Oh, and the pixel would be blue.

spacetoaster posted:

I did not know that citizencon had a photo booth that posted photos online. https://gcphotobooth.smugmug.com/Green-Screen-Events/Citizencon-2014/Citizencon-PhotoBooth-Prints/



We all know Chris immediately snatched that money out of his hand after the photo.

D_Smart posted:

Now that Montoya has forced my hand, I'm not going to spend time and resources on a single lawsuit, seeing as I've been working on this for months now. It's a complete mystery how /r/ds just closed up shop.

It's a dragnet. And I'm not going on a fishing trip. I have never - ever - walked into a court case I didn't prevail in, simply because I'm neither stupid, nor do I take them lightly.

I am just not going to wait any longer, even though complaints can be amended at any time, I've had it with these guys and their baseless accusations of my having committed crimes.

Virtual Captain posted:

mjotto posted:

Oh yes, he is: read here

quote:

So now, I am just going to sue [Accelerwraith] and Montoya for it. I have grown tired of warning them. And this is how I am going to completely ruin the entirety of their 2018 so that they can explain to the "SC Community" and the legal system, how exactly it is I doxed anyone (including Trevor himself). And I am marching them straight into Federal court over it. As I know that I am 100% right, by the time the dust settles, I am going to completely bankrupt them, while dragging RSI/CIG into it because these two are directly connected to CIG community activities, and have always had a vested financial interest in doing these things by proxy.

In A.D. 2018 war was beginning.

CrazyTolradi posted:

Will Montoya lose custody of his JPEGs?

Potato Salad posted:

Guys im fearful for my life, hugging my jpegs a lot today

The Titanic posted:

I wish I knew why people bang their heads against the Derek wall. They know what’s going to happen because Derek has done it to many people who have went toe to toe with him.

I guess they feel they will somehow be the Chosen One? The one who owns Derek so hard that he goes in a corner and cries? Because this has happened... never?

Well, good luck to the newest candidate to try to show up Derek at his own game. He’ll probably need all the luck he can get. Though I imagine if they get served actual court papers I have a feeling they get super cooperative, especially since winning an argument on the Internet, especially over a ducking video game, probably gets really stupid sounding at that point.

Contingency posted:

I can see it being a hamfisted attempt at the following:

1) Have an audience.
2) Pick a fight with DS.
3) Make a stand, and set up a gofundme to support fighting the good fight.
4) Collect a whopping $385.17 after fees, then back down before it gets to court.
5) Claim victory.

The guy is already trying to play up the sympathy angle, and a C&D is his cue to set up the fund. It's a calculated risk, but would pay off as long as DS is willing to accept apologies or retractions.

Beet Wagon posted:

Also lol if your first major move after talking up how you're gonna go toe to toe with a crazy old man on the internet is to scream "I'm afraid for my life" on twitter like a bitch, tagging every journalist you can think of.

juggalo baby coffin posted:

that montoya video with him green screened into his space ship with a bunch of stripper stock footage is maybe the most pathetic thing ive ever seen

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOzmer7Wurc (video: Citizen goes full internet toughguy with count em' 3 stripper gifs simultaneously)

Virtual Captain posted:

G0RF posted:

Remember that time half a year ago when Chris said 3.0 was being delayed to add extra polish and bugfixing because they expected a lot of new and returning players?

Seems like maybe they missed a couple spots. Somehow.

Toops posted:

Exactly totally agree. The truth, is, you can kludge together a blob of software that appears to do just about anything. Sometimes, that's the right thing to do. Usually, it's a terrible thing to do, because it only yields the illusion of progress. Now the expectations are high, because you cranked out this "awesome" thing in a small amount of time that barely works in demo and falls down hard in production. When the business goes "We want more! We got hot new customers in the pipeline!! OH!! And fix the bugs, customers are complaining that poo poo don't work!!!!" they are understandably confused when you say "well, actually we need to go back and actually do the thing we just finished properly." They'll say "Why didn't you do it right the first time!?!?" and you'll say "Uhh, dumbass, because you gave us ridiculous deadlines and we kind of mumbled that it wasn't possible but said 'OK, I guess' at the end."

Then it's years of half-finished re-writes, partial re-factors, the business complaining about slow feature velocity, turnover, complaining during 2-hour beer-soaked lunch sessions, etc. And the one constant is "production issues."

Star Citizen is the poster-child for development done completely loving wrong. Chris makes some outlandish, border-line psychotic public commitment, art churns out some high-poly assets up, eng duct tapes them together with no long-term plan (imo assuming what they're writing is throw-away prototype *for demo purposes only* panic code), and then CIG marketing parades it out in front of backers to raise money. Then they pull a new branch and start cooking up the next load of bullshit.

It's Marketing-Driven-Development, which is just countdown to failure.

Galarox posted:

G0RF posted:

In unrelated news, looks like Sandi has another movie in the can. A film starring Eric Roberts and shot (it would appear) this fall.

Rabelais D posted:

Getting paid to do nothing while pursuing an acting career is one of the perks of being a successful game developer's wife, don't you guys know anything about game development?

Scruffpuff posted:

quote:

I don't believe in auras or energy fields around people or any of that poo poo. That said, I am 100% certain that there is an aura or energy field around Sandi that makes her a loving terrible, atrocious "actress" at all times. Every cell in her body, every hair on her head, every red blood cell, every molecule of oxygen in her lungs absolutely screams "LOOK AT ME I'M AN ACTRESS AND I'M ACTING AND I'M ON CAMERA LOOK AT ME." It's absolutely amazing. I've seen bad movies with bad actors (the NOOOO troll meme comes to mind) and I've seen movies where a good actor is trying to portray a bad actor, so they do it on purpose (Robert De Niro did this across Shatner of all people.)

None of them even approaches how loving awful this woman is. Even her still pictures come across like she's an alien trying to imitate HUU-MONN behavior without a reference point. I'm not saying this to pile on Sandi, it has nothing to do with Star Citizen, but that woman is probably the only living, breathing example of the uncanny valley I've ever seen.

PederP posted:

Thing is that space / sci-fi is a great setting for a game. Just like high fantasy, grimdark, cyberpunk, many historical periods, etc. Not all settings work equally well for all genres. Space Opera is great for 4X, difficult for Grand Strategy, and Stellaris does a pretty darn good job at being what it is, imo, by using 4X elements to address aspects where it is a difficult setting for Grand Strategy. Your mileage may vary. But for me that's one of the main reasons I enjoy it, and I have difficulty getting hooked by Space Opera 4X in general.

Star Citizen is a weird setting which is a little bit Space Opera and very much "WW2-sci-fi". That is great for a story-based dogfighting game that doesn't care about physics and realism, but is about cool pewpews and hammy cinematics. But it's a terrible setting for a sandbox game, a decent one for a PvP game and a difficult choice for an PvE MMO. Star Citizen wants to be all of these and it absolutely doesn't work. Even if we disregard all the issues on the technical side, the choice of setting and game doesn't work. A PvE MMO needs a theme park and content-recyling mechanics. A PvP game needs a strong meta-game based on factions, rankings and/or player communities. Sandboxes need a mechanics supporting exploration, player-constructed content and emergent gameplay.

It's really difficult to make a space MMO that isn't total garbage, and it's probably going to be niché if it works. Like Eve and ED. I think that's why so many backers pin their hopes on subsumption being SkyNet, procedural content somehow not being repetitive and "pipelines". Because what they want isn't actually possible with current technology.

They want West World or the Holo Deck. But procedural content gives you NMS, Dwarf Fortress and ED. Current AI technology gives you uh... DOTA bots? Black & White AI was overhyped. Radiant AI was overhyped. "Pipelines" give you the amount of content in AAA games. Attempting accurate simulation of physics at an object-level in a space MMO as anything but fancy local VFX gives you either Glitchy Lag Simulator or Go-Broke-In-The-Cloud Simulator.

Seeing the constant chants of "you don't understand game development" irks me to no end, because backing the Star Citizen project is based on fundamentally not understanding what is technologically possible, let alone what is possible with fricking CryEngine/LumberYard (which can be used to make awesome games, but not to secure the Turing Award) - because where Molyneux used dreams as a marketing tool, the open development of Star Citizen leaves no doubts about CIG constantly trying to do what the technical foundations absolutely do not support. This isn't about alpha or development cycles. The problem isn't the glitches, bugs, or missing content. That's just development hell, and good games can emerge from that. The problem is the stupid idea that there is some magic technology underneath it all, and that's going to save the day. And that's where CIG should be honest and squash those insane expectations. But I guess that would kill the project faster than any space court.

AP posted:

reddit posted:

Honestly, I'd rather see the grief now when CiG can work out solutions to mitigate it, than once the game goes live. The turrets at Ollisar are a start. Once Subsumption is ready to tackle policing, we'll see some greater challenges for would-be griefers.

reddit posted:

It'll be interesting to see how they handle the difference between "legitimate piracy" (piracy that is engaging and brings immersion to the game albeit frustrating) and just plain old asshatitude. People would poop their pants if they incorporated it - but I think they need to add something to the extent of not being able to play the game for, I dunno, 12 hours if you get caught by the authorities after blowing up ship or stealing ships several times in a short period of time.

Jonny Nox posted:

So is subsumption supposed to be code for magick? It's like some of these people have a child's perception about what goes into even a simple decision.

Othin posted:

The thing about Star Citizen is that at this point is that it has gone on for so long and generated so much insanity that people think you are lying or exaggerating when you try to explain it. Like any one story from this would be hard to believe. Five+ years worth is just too much.

*Exceed original goal by a hundred plus million dollars.. still do not have content from original demo in game.
*CEO and HR/Marketing director attempt to hide marriage
*HR/Marketing director sings Nazi song to Germans
*CEO tells HR/Marketing director to just fly first class. HR/Marketing director tells this to media.
*Plucky little startup has like 14 offices/divisions/subsidiaries spread across the globe.
*In order to prove how honest and straightforward they were as a company, they promised backers that they would release financials in full if they didnt ship by a certain point. When that point came they just deleted all references to that and wrote a new *ironclad* TOS.
*Have missed every single date and milestone they have set for themselves.
*Accidentally* release dev build to public since it was on an open server
*The Book of Loaf
*Ticklegate
*insanely expensive and impractical office furniture
*Ryan Archer
*Backers buying a $14k package of spaceships that they can't play
*The backers....
*switching engines
*Stating SQ42 is part only to be spun off. Then they claim it isn't separate but A la carte.
*A 2mil loan for a game that raised millions.
*And now the lawsuit

Mr Fronts posted:

Pacer update...

https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/23222744/Crytek_GmbH_v_Cloud_Imperium_Games_Corp_et_al
https://www.scribd.com/document/367101474/Crytek-v-CIG
Worth Clicking: https://www.diffchecker.com/GTqP0gvu (document: Skadden adds "intentionally" everywhere)

Cao Ni Ma posted:

quote:

"Original Summons NOT returned. NOTICE OF FILING PROOFS OF SERVICE RE COMPLAINT AND SUPPORTING INITIATING DOCUMENTS"

Your honor weve defaulted on this lawsuit but we have a good reason, we were on vacation you see. You got to understand game development

D_Smart posted:

It's more complex than that. Read my just unleashed Tweet storm

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/948544238790299648.html

- sold SQ42 as a separate product
- used SQ42 as collateral for a loan
- used SQ42 as the reason for tax credits (which are also part of the loan)

Unless Ortwin can poo poo a GLA that says they can develop more than ONE title, they're hosed. Completely. It's game over.

And given the bad blood between Chris and CryTek, they're going to completely destroy him for he did to not only them, but also their company (poaching their key engineers etc).

Solarin posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

I am overcome with grief.

you will progress through the five stages:

Rub
Rub
Hug jpeg
Rub
Blog

Virtual Captain posted:

Preen Dog posted:

Bofast posted:

Great, it's Schrödinger's game all over again

The cat jitters so hard it's both inside and outside the box simultaneously.

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

Charlie Hall has some breaking news abouut the videogame star citizen

https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/3/16845616/star-citizen-versus-kickstarter-money-raised

quote:

Star Citizen raised more money than every other video game on Kickstarter combined in 2017 - By a factor of two, and for the second year in a row

For the second year in a row, the team working on Star Citizen say they’ve raised more money than every other video game on Kickstarter combined. The numbers, which are self-reported and do not include returns, aren’t even close.

Chris Roberts’ collection of spacefaring games raised $34.91 million in 2017, down slightly from $36.11 million in 2016. Meanwhile, successful Kickstarters for video games overall remained relatively flat in 2017, with $17.25 million raised, down from around $17.6 million the year before.

That means the Star Citizen project has raised more than double the amount of every other game project on Kickstarter — more than 700 in all — for two years in a row.

However, the data set is complicated by several significant factors. First, CIG/RSI refused to report how much money they’ve returned to backers. Several significant returns are currently being contested, including one in excess of $25,000. It’s therefore impossible to know how large a proportion of its funding CIG/RSI have been forced to refund.

Additionally, Kickstarter said that of all the money pledged to video game projects in 2016, 85 to 88 percent of it went to successful campaigns. We've gone with the higher numbers for our calculations.

The Star Citizen project, which includes a single-player game called Squadron 42 and a multiplayer game referred to as the “persistent universe,” is incomplete and currently has no release date.

Bofast posted:

I never thought I would turn the lyrics of a Dolly Parton song into something about an Intel bug and Star Citizen, but here we are


Flushing out the cache and I stumble to the kernel
Pour myself a cup of speculation
Branch, pre-fetch and try to get ahead
Jump address spaces and the time starts tickin'
Out in the verse, performance keeps droppin'
With chips like me on the job from 9 to 5

Frames go 9 to 5, what a way to kill my livin'
Barely gettin' by, it's all takin' and no givin'
They confuse your mind and no longer take store credit
It's enough to make you refund if you let it
9 to 5, no service or devotion
You would think Sandi would deserve a fat demotion
Want to make it right but that Chris won't seem to let me
I swear sometimes that man knows nothing 'bout me!

They sell you dreams just to watch 'em shatter
You're just a step on the Croberts's ladder
Now you got dreams he dare not take away
You're in the wankpod with a lotta your friends
Waitin' for the day your ship'll come in
An' the tide's gonna turn and it's all gonna roll your way

Frames drop 9 to 5, such an awful way of livin'
Barely clippin' by, it's all sellin' and no shippin'
They abuse your mind and no longer take store credit
It's enough to make you refund if you let it
9 to 5, yeah they got you where they want you
There's a better life, and you dream about it, don't you?
It's a losin' game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life puttin' money in his wallet

9 to 5, whoa what a way to make a livin'
Parpmen floatin' by, it's all selling' and no shippin'
Free your broken mind and refund all your store credit
It's already made you crazy 'cause you let it
9 to 5, yeah Chris's got you where he wants you
There's a better life, and you dream about it, don't you?
There is no real game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life puttin' money in his wallet

9 to 5, funding 9 to 5

AP posted:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/215061920?t=01h19m53s (video: In today's exciting episode, Twerk17 talks about how Electronic Arts is more accountable than CIG)

hot balls man no homo posted:

AP posted:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/215061920?t=01h33m00s (video: WTFo's poll estimates SC release in 2022)

I listened to this for a minute or two and that bald dickhead went and said that if Star Citizen lives up to 20% of the hype it has built up, it would still be one of the best games ever...

LISTEN UP YOU THUNDERING MORON, IF WHAT THEY HAVE PROMISED YOU IS A GAME THAT WILL BE FIVE TIMES BETTER THAN ANYTHING THAT IS CURRENTLY OR WILL EVENTUALLY BE OUT THERE, THEY ARE DEFINITELY LYING TO YOU.

Scruffpuff posted:

I'm filling out paperwork for a surgery, and there is a question that says "Do you have an internal nerve stimulator?" I asked my wife what that was, and she said, "Apparently this clinic gets a lot of patients from the Stimpire."

BobHoward posted:

So the funny thing about seeing commandos pinning so many hopes on subsumption, while claiming SC is never-done-before cutting edge stuff, is that subsumption is something I first learned about during an undergrad robotics project course.

That was about 20 years ago. And it had already been around for some time when I read about it, because it wasn’t new material you had to scour just-published papers for, it was in the class textbook.

Subsumption AI research was about building swarms of individually-stupid micro-robots that would collaborate to accomplish some slightly complex task by mimicing a computer scientist’s understanding of how individual ants work together in an ant colony. Each ant-bot was programmed with a set of several primitive, simple behaviors. The idea is that only one of those canned behaviors gets to control the bot at a time; selection of the active behavior loop was determined by sensory feedback and comm messages from other nearby bots. Inactive behaviors are ‘subsumed’ beneath the active one, hence the name.

They used this concept to successfully do things vaguely similar to an ant colony. Let the worker bots roam free in a little environment, and some of them would fall into gathering behaviors to move “food” (crumpled up balls of aluminum foil) to a staging area while others settled into moving it from the staging area into the “nest” for storage. Stuff like that.

The theme was trying to make simple individual rules create more complex, emergent herd behavior, and it was all MIT Media Lab as gently caress, that being the lab which invented it. For those not in the know, MIT’s Media Lab is an academic compsci research lab which gets a disproportionate amount of publicity and funding due to a combo of friends in very high places and a focus on doing wacky, press friendly things.

So that’s the revolutionary AI tech which is going to make SC NPCs behave in a super fidelitous lifelike fashion: something invented a quarter century ago as a crude way of emulating ant brains. But not real ant brains, ant brains as understood by a bunch of compsci grad students and/or profs whose grasp of insect behavior was probably poor. And (so far as I can tell) this super advanced thing has not seen much use outside of pie in the sky academic research, because most real world robots are automated welders and CNC milling machines which just need to mindlessly repeat a control program over and over.

On that last point, don’t get me wrong. It’s cool and good to spend a little bit of society’s wealth on goofy stuff that has no immediate use irl, and you are always going to have to accept that some of it won’t have any use ever because it’s tricky to figure out which is which ahead of time. It’s just - lol no, cultists, subsumption is not gonna make the game good (or a game). It’s not the right way to make NPCs behave like people, or in a way that is fun to interact with.

It’s also easy to guess how this idea became a big thing at CIG. Junior grade AI programmer is told to figure out how to make lifelike NPCs, finds this One Weird Trick that seems to make cool stuff happen out of extremely simple base rules, doesn’t realize that maybe it’s not quite so easy to make it generate convincing human behavior or that those apparently simple rules may have needed a ton of tweaking to get right, sells it to Chris, and pretty soon it’s on the list of gee whiz material used to milk whales.

TheAgent posted:

Dusty Lens posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aokaaWeRjc (video: Old wingman's hangar visits Moon Collider, talks about AI, 2014)

This old video does a fairly good job at showcasing just how long CIG has been spinning these plates.

I love how CIG has seriously fuckin burned every single motherfucking company they worked with from 2013 to 2016

every single fuckin one

boviscopophobic posted:

AP posted:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/215225889?t=04h13m48s (video: CryTek_Legal_Team follows twitch streamer)

peter gabriel posted:

The name of the CIG's law firm is [POTATO]

Dusty Lens posted:

haha what is that even supposed to mean.

Oh jeez Chris at the end you really gotta pick a look and stick with it man.

juggalo baby coffin posted:

so star citizen, the 'game' that exists, is a bunch of assets poorly imported into the demo crytek made 5 years ago right?

every time i find something out about how they make the game it amazes me. just all the travails they've had with getting single ships to not lag the servers out. it's crazy. they make design and coding mistakes that like, amateur modders don't make in other games.

Ramadu posted:

https://i.imgur.com/s6dNobO.mp4

if the crobblers made the matrix

Rabelais D posted:

I was wondering what Chinese gamers think about Star Citizen so I found quite a popular "ask" thread with someone wondering how people view the game. Here's a quick and dirty translation of the most recent reply (from a month ago). I don't think i quite understand the final line but it's funny anyway.

谁特么在乎这个啊…

3.0 ptu, pu will be out by March 2018 at the earliest, one year later than predicted…Squadron 42 [release] doesn’t even have a timeframe. At the moment bugs are everywhere, the dragonfly tips over as soon as you start it and infinitely runs into the ground, there’s all kinds of clipping issues , the Aquila is just the Andromeda, the carrier-based p52 is still unusable, the Carrack has been worked on for 3 years, and there's gently caress-all to show for it. Although you can say it’s an alpha, but you’ve been fiddling around so long (five years now) and all you have is this to scam people, there isn’t even the framework of a game and you spend all day worrying about character models standing on an inclined plane, who gives a gently caress…?

Toops posted:

Look, we can't on one hand claim that CIG habitually lies, then turn right around and take "We have 400 people working for us!" as fact. We don't get to pick and choose what data are reliable. If they lie, then we need hard evidence to form a working theory. If CIG's word is no good, then we don't really have much to go on, as evidenced by literal years of this thread "calling" CIG's bankruptcy, and yet here they are.

Let's all agree on this right now: We don't have any actual visibility into their balance sheet. We're gluing crumbs together and trying to make a cake. As an abridged list:

- We don't know how many people CIG has employed, currently employ, or will employ in the future, nor their pay scales, benefits, etc.
- We don't know their CapEx or their OpEx.
- We don't know their cash position.
- We don't know anything about CIG's lines of credit outside of "some" dollars from Coutts.
- We don't know how many wild-eyed people whose parents recently died and left them the house have privately invested.


According to Goon estimates, CIG should answer the bankruptcy filing in 2015 2016 2017 2018

EminusSleepus posted:

Yes the biggest cost now is salary, last time it was Ben's food allowance

peter gabriel posted:

If GIG admit to using cryengine then crytek win because CIG are idiots
If CIG say they used Lumberyard crytek win because the exclusivity clause
It's a classic catch 42 situation and Chris has a thumb for a head

Gosts posted:

My magnum opus is done

AP posted:

ManofManyAliases posted:

At the absolute worst, a 10m settlement and CIG goes about its business. So far there have been a dozen pages about speculation, the end of times as we know it, and parp. Yawn.

Someone called it earlier: a nothingburger.

I'm not willing to bet $3k on the result.

DapperDon posted:

MoMa stop it. I mean just stop it right now. This is embarrassing how stupid you think we all are here. There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING at all in the lawsuit that has a drat thing to do with if CryTek was negligent in any way, shape, or form. If so then the there would have been mention of it just out of a sense of Covering the Corporate rear end and don't think for one moment that Chris or Ortwin would be posting that poo poo to every outlet on the internet to defend their rear end like he did when the Couttes loan was discovered. Do you think a firm like Skadden is going to chain themselves to such and embarrassing turn of events like defending a client that nuked their own contract by negligence? Any paralegal on planet earth would destroy their lawsuit with prejudice by responding to the complaint on day 1 with that little termination clause on the very contract they are disputing. That would be devastating to a firm of Skaddens caliber. Now I am convinced 100% that you are not in the legal profession nor are you a part of CIG in any way. In fact, I am really leaning on the possibility that you are in fact a shared account from those brainwashed fellows over at Relay. Because your post here reeks of Erris's defense bulletpoints. Stick to talking about kickstarter belts and booze because as of now you lost all the little bit of cred your little gimmick here was giving you.

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

act now on this rare opportunity to give us 350 bucks for nothing.

Preen Dog posted:

They must be in great financial shape if Crobbler will do tours of the dream factory for $20k.

PederP posted:

This kind of tour isn't to bring in the participation fee, which barely covers the costs of arranging this. The point of the fee is to weed out backers who don't have open wallets. The point of the tour is to get them to spend more - it's a way to build confidence, create a feeling of belonging to a special inner circle, talk to high-spending backers about what they want, etc. I've seen the exact same kind of thing in the financial sector. Brokers, hedge funds, wealth managers, etc. do these events on a regular basis.

It does not reek of desperation, but is a tried and true way to increase revenue by activating existing clients and bringing new clients into an environment ideal for trying to turn them into loyal big-spenders. I would be surprised if they didn't have special deals for them on-site. If they're ruthless enough they can even use aggressive sales techniques during such an event.

Were it one of my friends or relatives going to such an event - unless they were confident, strong-willed and difficult to manipulate (which are not common traits among space sim nerds) I'd do my very best to talk them out of it.

D_Smart posted:

WAIT!!!!!

What if the May invite is to sell those dedicated 60 concierge shares in F42-UK?

They already laid the ground work by splitting shares last month.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/944210205243518976.html

Taintrunner posted:

How loving insane do you have to be to sell tours of a game dev studio that has never released a loving game for the loving ridiculous price of $350 a pop. Yeah, great idea Sandi. You’re a real fuckin’ marketing genius.

Taintrunner posted:

Hey remember when EA flew out a bunch of Youtubers or whatever as part of a “Gamechangers” program for Battlefront 2 as a promise to listen to their feedback and make the game not a steaming pile of poo poo on release? It was a steaming pile of poo poo on release.

Alright, now what if we made those people PAY for the privilege! To be shuffled around a computer farm of tired, fresh out of college devs who have no real insights or stories trying to jerry-rig a crazy Hollywood bigwig wannabe’s fantasies of what a space MMO is together over a feature creep from hell, and theorycraft a shitton of all new game mechanics for our team to maybe try and implement without crashing everything on launch!

DogonCrook posted:

Its actually 3 payments of 350 if you are concierge lol. I came here to lol at the as seen on tv pricing.

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

https://www.pcinvasion.com/cig-holding-star-citizen-special-event-concierge-backers-charging

quote:

Star Citizen dinner and tour with Chris Roberts – Only $350 if you’ve backed enough

This evening CIG mailed Star Citizen Concierge backers to announce a special event which will take place on 4 May. Concierge backers are the die-hard backers who have pumped more than $1000 into the project so far.

This special event will include a tour of the L.A studio, a dinner and a sit-down with Chris Roberts and “key members of the dev team”. CIG will be filming the event which will be shown at a later date. Tickets for this event are going to be limited with only sixty being made available.

CIG will be charging $350 for this special event which I have to say is quite astonishing. You would think that with the 170+ million in the bank they could invite some of the really high paying backers for a free tour and a meet and greet. What is truly sad is that some backers will likely pay for the ticket and all the costs to get there.


“Ahhhh! Lovely dinner guys. Now you pick up the tab”

Is CIG now going to start charging for absolutely everything despite the huge support the backers have already given? It’s starting to look like that.

In the past, I have personally been invited to studios for tours, with flights included, as a fan of a game (this was prior to being a member of the press) simply to say thanks for the support. It was always greatly appreciated. I was certainly never asked to stump-up cash to attend.

Bootcha posted:

okay seriously

you true believer citizens reading this thread

I was an investor, like I could have made money off of Star Citizen, if it didn't turn into what it is now

owning a share in CIG is just throwing money away

part of my deal was not having a say in the creative development of the game

do you really think with one or even ten measly shares in CIG will entitle you to some kind of expression of your dreams

if CIG offers you a share, get a refund

DO NOT BUY A SHARE WITHOUT SEEING THE FINANCIALS FIRST

this is investment 101 fuckers

iron buns posted:

Star Citizen: A big fat $350 nothingburger dinner

Daztek posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/Schedule-report-05012018

quote:

Now that Alpha 3.0 is out, we wanted to give you all an update on our plans for this coming year. As we discussed before the holidays, we now have a delivery schedule based on dates rather than features.

We are doing this for several reasons. First, thanks to the huge improvements to core tech, we can be more predictable about delivering our patches, as we are building upon and refining existing tech. Second, we want to get more build iteration, which gives us more opportunities to get feedback from the community going forward. Finally, this new approach provides more flexibility in our development. If a proposed feature takes longer than anticipated, we will push it to the next release, rather than delaying other new content.

We plan on delivering new builds once a quarter, starting with our first drop at the end of March. After that, we aim to deliver again at the end of June, September, and December of this year.

Our first release will pull together all the great work that was completed last year with a focus on optimizing the server and client. We also intend to include one or two new features which will enhance gameplay around Crusader.

3.1 is about enhancing performance and polishing the gameplay systems and UI, including ships, system traversal, a large balance pass of our economy, and improving AI for spaceflight and combat. All the great data and feedback from the community over the holiday period is really going to help us with these tasks.

Although 3.1 is our focus for late March, several teams will also be working on our long-term goals for this year, in which we plan to deliver the vast majority of systems and mechanics so players have a variety of options to lose themselves in the ‘Verse.

For our end-of-June release, we plan to implement the initial tier 0 versions of mining, salvaging, mobile refueling, and repair into the game, as well as give the player the ability to create their own missions like hiring mercs, transport, or refueling missions. On the AI side, we plan to improve both ship and FPS AI for both missions as well as general activity on space and planetary bases.

Our next delivery in late September will introduce another major long-term tech goal: Object Container Streaming. This technology will allow us to start expanding the Stanton system with additional destinations, while managing our memory usage much better. In this delivery, we would also like to start introducing the mechanics of how you stake and file land claims and the gameplay that comes with this feature. This release will also continue to consolidate and polish all the new features in the past milestone.

That will leave our final build of the year in late December. Now that our streaming tech has been tested and can support the huge amount of new data content introduced(), we will continue to expand the Stanton System, allowing players to explore, fulfill their career choices, and do many different types of missions, either with friends or on their own.

Stay tuned as the new Star Citizen Production Roadmap will come online along with the new RSI website later this month, with more development and release details.

See you in the ‘Verse (literally),

— The Star Citizen Team

In the meantime, head over to the launcher page and download the 3.0.0 patch to see the universe for yourself. You can also visit our Spectrum thread to leave your feedback.

Gravity_Storm posted:

So they are literally going to deliver NOTHING this year.

Object container streaming! Wow that so exciting. Sounds like a Tupperware party.

Virtual Captain posted:

This is pathetic even for CIG.


Exciting new features coming this year such as:
• Object Container Streaming
•
•

Buy a tank!

Thoatse posted:

Thoatse posted:

Mokinokaro posted:

Nothing Works on PTU

It's been five years and fifteen days
Since you took my pledge away
I stream every night and sleep all day
Since you took my pledge away

Since 3.0 I can do whatever I want
I can clip through anywhere I want
I can eat my dinner in a fancy wankpod
But nothing
I said nothing can take away these blues
'Cause nothing ever works
Nothing works on PTU

It's been so lonely without your patch
Since the netcode's wrong
Nothing can stop this framerate from falling
Tell me CIG where did you go wrong

I could play many games on Steam
But they'd only remind me of you
I went to Chris Roberts and guess what he told me?
Guess what he told me?
He said girl your money's all gone
No matter what you do, but he's a fool
'Cause nothing ever works
Nothing works on the PTU

All the features that you promised MoMa
On the forum
You lied every night and day
I know that dealing with Derek is sometimes hard
But here he comes with another blog
'Cause nothing works
Nothing works on the PTU

Nothing works
Nothing works on the PTU
Nothing works
Nothing works on the PTU

boviscopophobic posted:

Legal docs (not doxx), grab them while they're hot. Includes CIG's response, a motion to dismiss, and a copy of the GLA.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mPjfXrjAf9RUq3_5cJgd-hF-I5XoCQta

Comedy addendum: they really did invoke the "wrong company" defense.

IncredibleIgloo posted:

This is the first time we expected something in 2 weeks and CIG delivered early!

iospace posted:

Ok, so here's my take on the matter. I'm not a lawyer, but whatever. There's 5 things being claimed here.

1. CIG created two games when they were limited to one.

Take: This one might get tossed depending if CIG can convince the jury that SC and SQ42 are NOT two games.


2. CIG was to only use the Crytek engine.

Take: This is entirely dependent on the interpretation of the language of the GLA (which isn't entirely clear), and if it can be successfully argued or not that Lumberyard is CryEngine.


3. CIG was to use CryEngine branding on the first loading screens.

Take: This one is largely open and shut. CIG did not.


4. CIG was to send bugfixes to Crytek.

Take: Again, largely open and shut, with Crytek a paper trail of CIG not returning code on request. The burden is on CIG to disprove this one.


5. CIG was to keep code secret.

Take: This is largely open and shut, though I expect CIG to say that the code is on github at some point.


So that's 2.5 dunks, .5 "eh" (copyright stuff), and 2 potential hard things for Crytek.

Ghostlight posted:

quote:

I am so confused right now. Are they trying to ninth-dimensional-chess their legal defense?

It's amazing. Their position is basically that 1) the GLA gives them license to use it in both the Star Citizen and Squadron 42 game, and that 2) even if it didn't, they aren't using it anymore so what's your beef?



Also, hands up who called this first because I know for a fact someone did

EggsAisle posted:

Waitaminute, what's this?

quote:

During the Term of the License, or any renewals thereof, and for a period of two years thereafter, and for a period of two years thereafter, Licensee, its principals, and Affiliates shall not directly or indirectly engage in the business of designing, developing, creating, supporting, maintaining, promoting, selling, or licensing (directly or indirectly) any game engine or middleware that compete with CryEngine.

That looks, uh, pretty damning...

less than three posted:

Can't omit their "You're suing the wrong shell company so it should be dismissed."

quote:

no basis for naming RSI as a defendant to either claim in this action. Accordingly, the claims against RSI should be dismissed.

EggsAisle posted:

Interesting stuff! The bits from the GLA that stand out to me so far are: (note: I have no legal training or expertise.)

WHEREAS Licensee desires to use, and Crytek desires to grant the license to use, the "CryEngine" for the game currently entitled "Space [sic] Citizen" and its related space fighter game "Squadron 42," together hereafter the "Game", pursuant to the terms and conditions of this Agreement;

I'd have to read the complaint again, or maybe there's something else I'm missing, but it does sound like CIG is covered in this respect.

AP posted:

RSI is proud to reveal that we never had any license agreement with Crytek, as part of this ip infringement legal case.

Abuminable posted:

Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury, please rise as we present the prosecution's surprise witness: Dr. Derek K. Smart. The Court advises the Jury to please permit the esteemed witness to loving finish.

AP posted:

I'm calling the mother of all tweetstorms for today.

Loxbourne posted:

I'm not an IP litigator (although I do know one who works in CA and who I might be able to get to weigh in), so I'm not going to comment on the merits. I'm going to comment on the drafting.

The way that document is written says an awful lot about CIG's priorities. I feel for the lawyers who had to write it, because I'd bet money they had Chris and Ortwin leaning over their shoulders demanding stuff as they drew it up. Statements of case are supposed to be calm and clear summaries of a party's position; this one rages about those big CryTek meanies and how crap their arguments are. I've worked for egomaniacs and I recognise the signs. We've got:

1. A lengthy rant at the start about how mean CryTek are and how they tell filthy filthy lies. This doesn't actually win points with judges (maybe juries, but even then...). The court's got a dozen files to get through today, they don't appreciate having to wade through your detailed allegations about what grade of cock the Plaintiff gargles.

2. A decidedly aggressive tone in the first few pages, i.e. the ones an investor or backer are most likely to read. This is the real "fire and fury", a ferocious defence that plays to the crowd and reassures them that their money is safe. Obviously CIG would like to see their motion to dismiss succeed, but it's rather akin to the injunction Skadden opened with; a furious counterattack to show how big their law-peen is.

3. A fanatical need, in the first few pages, to state that CryTek's statements are false. Okay, we get it, why every time you use the word "statement"? Because someone was breathing down the drafter's neck about how incredibly evil CryTek are and demanding that they put in how all their statements are filthy lies. I wonder if Chris is the kind of client who demands personal signoff on case papers?

Matters then calm down for a while, probably because Chris didn't read that far and because FFKS actually need to set out the technical details of their case, but then we start up again with....

4. An entire section devoted to saying how wonderful and blameless Ortwin is, and how his reputation is irrevocably harmed by nasty things said about him on websites.

This isn't even relevant to the defence anymore. Presumably it was drawn up in response to the earlier allegation and then left in on Ortwin's orders so there was a public statement refuting the mean things Skadden said about him (and his peon, who gets namechecked once). That tells me all I need to know about Ortwin.

Summary: CIG's egomaniac executives are bleeding through onto the page. It hasn't compromised anything yet, but this would provoke some eyerolls in most courts. They're still playing to the crowd, which is an understandable and rational response but does leave open all the comedy meltdown options this thread dreams of.

quote:

one of CIG's lawyers:
(tweet: Who else is frustrated by the lack of GIFs and emojis in Outlook? Or is that not yet an appropriate way for outside counsel to communicate?)

Xaerael posted:

you'd have to be a total retard to think that CIG's version was fact. "Crytek LITERALLY gave us CryEngine FOREVER, and no one else is EVER allowed to use it!"

loving retarded. CryTek is a company that survives purely on people using it's loving engine you loving retards. RETARDS. WALL TO WALL RETARDS. LOOK AT THE RETARDS.

I swear, when this come to trial, and CIG's crew is called into the room, if this doesn't play while the Judge yells at the top of her voice "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! THE RETARDS FROM CIG!!! (and the idiots defending them)", it's a missed opportunity.

Sabreseven posted:

I find the way he printed his name and position within the company even funnier tbh and bonus points for not knowing what the date was:

MedicineHut posted:

This may sound a bit flippant but afaik development of SQ42 started in 2011-2012, with CryEngine. Not in 2016 with Lumberyard. Lumberyard switch was announced in December 2016 whereas SQ42 carved out and marketed separately from the Game was announced on February 2016.

There is at least 11 months worth of CIG apparently and intentionally breaking the GLA in terms of "Game" definition (scroll to page 24, Exhibit 2 here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mPjfXrjAf9RUq3_5cJgd-hF-I5XoCQta) and/or engine use rights. And probably more in terms of engine exclusivity as a whole.

Beet Wagon posted:

So if I understand this correctly, it seems like one of their main tactics going up against one of the best law firms in existence is the very same tactic they used to try and avoid giving a bunch of neckbeard idiots their money back. A tactic which failed against people with little to no understanding of the law, who were only in the fight for a couple hundred bucks. Against Skadden.

No, actually. It's the other other company.

Zzr posted:

Furthermore, CIG/RSI/15 others didn't use lumberyard or even cryengine, because there is no game.

TheAgent posted:

omg there is a section arguing that this is tort not contract law and I am loving dying

like never has a legal document made me lol this much

TheAgent posted:

there's almost no way I can follow almost anything they are saying
although to sum up for non-legal peeps its basically

quote:

Crytek is a big stupid meanie. Look at them play to the Fake News Media and slander us. They are really, really awful. Also, they are bad at contracts. They don't even know what a contract is or the right person to sue. We didn't do anything wrong by breaking every part of the GLA we attached, if you listen to our insane interpretations of it. This shouldn't be in court, at all, and is a sham and a lie. Let me tell you about tort law. Also we took everything about tort law and copied it directly from the first Google result lol no they really did

D_Smart posted:

OK, I'm done. Now to review it and fired it off. Seriously, aside from my own bias, I was hoping that RSI/CIG had something (like the Ortwin waiver) which would have at least made this a worthy fight. By dayum, they have like...nothing. At all.

Tippis posted:

Phi230 posted:

If they filed a 12(b)(6) that's the legal equivalent of saying "nuh uh" and failing your hands

Also known as a CIG101.

AngusPodgorny posted:

I'm going to take the minority view and say some of the arguments are at least colorable (not going to disagree on the writing, which is crap):

There’s an argument as to whether “exclusive” means that CIG needs to only use Crytek’s engine, or whether only CIG can use Crytek’s engine, and there’s support either way. The contract isn’t as strongly in favor of Crytek’s argument as the petition indicated, which is why I wanted to actually see it.

For CIG’s side, when you get an exclusive license, it’s usually not an obligation on you, but rather a benefit because it means no one else gets to use whatever you’re licensing. This is reinforced because “exclusive” in contained in the subsections to 2.1, which is the grant (good stuff for CIG), rather than 2.2, which is restrictions (bad stuff for CIG).
For Crytek’s side, it’s not an ungrammatical reading of the sentence that CIG can only use Crytek’s engine, so they can at least argue it’s ambiguous and get into intent. Their reading is also supported by other clauses, such as CIG having to always display Crytek’s copyright, rather than only having to display Crytek’s copyright if they continue using Crytek’s engine. Finally, they have an argument that CIG’s interpretation isn’t reasonable, because it can’t be that CIG is the only company that can use Crytek’s engine at all, and it makes no sense for the clause to mean that only CIG can develop Star Citizen with Crytek’s engine, because of course other companies wouldn’t be developing Star Citizen.

Overall, it’s a poorly written contract (sorry, Ortwin), so the fight is probably going to go on. Which is typical, because transactional lawyers aren’t all that good at writing contracts. Litigators are way better at tearing them apart.

The whole argument about RSI not being a party to the contract is perfectly valid, and why you have separate companies. A separate legal entity can’t breach a contract it's not a party to, so Crytek is going to have to jump through more hoops than it has so far.

Despite having some valid legal points, this is still a badly written motion. Judges don’t appreciate bombastic personal attacks, and CIG did themselves no favors there. Like claiming that Crytek was trying to mislead the court by not filing a copy of the contract, when there’s no need to attack evidence to a petition. They also managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with the Ortwin discussion. They couldn’t just take their minor win of talking to Crytek and having the Ortwin allegations dropped from the petition, which Crytek took the high road and did. No, they had to continue to complain about allegations not in the live petition, which just makes CIG look like assholes.

trucutru posted:

So no one gets to use cryengine do develop games (or space games) while SC is in development? How does *that* work?

I mean, how could you possibly argue this? Is there any example of something like that ever happening?

Nyast posted:

Well, that's if they argue that "only us in the entire world have the rights to use Cryengine no matter the product". Which is completely stupid.

Instead they're arguing that "only us in the entire world have the rights to use Cryengine [for Star citizen]". Which is equally stupid, but in a different way. Since they own the IP of SC in the first place. That line shouldn't even exist in the first place in that case, since it's standard copyright protection to say that nobody else can do anything with the product you own.

So I'm at a loss, I'm not sure which one they're arguing, both make no sense to me. Only Crytek's version kind of makes sense, even if I agree it seems to lack a more explicit clause in the "restrictions" chapter. But at least it makes some sense. CIG arguments do not.

IncredibleIgloo posted:

Skadden: Mr. Freyermeyer, are you saying that the standard Crytek GLA gives each client the exclusive rights to use of the Crytek game engine, excluding all other companies from using the product?
Ortwin: Yes, that is correct.
Skadden: What leads you to believe that?
Ortwin: I wrote that, so I should know the intention.
Skadden: Are you saying that as the IP lawyer for Crytek you gave each licensee exclusive use of the game engine? Wouldn't that be an example of gross incompetence or malfeasance?
Ortwin: ...

Galarox posted:

FailureToReport posted:

Ugh, that Leonard guy is soooo terrible to watch.

I mean, kudos to him for admitting he's a backer in the first video, but he skims the poo poo out of that response and highlights things he thinks are favorable to CIG.

He completely negates to touch on any portion of the GLA that shows Squadron 42 and Star Citizen were the same product, etc etc etc.



The fact that he's a copyright lawyer (is that right?) and doesn't bother to go over the GLA in it's entirety , or the entire bottom section that outlines Squadron 42 and Star Citizen as the same game, shows either;

1. He's absolutely loving terrible at picking portions of a document to skip over

2. He knew that section was there and chose to skip it so he could drop his dank "If I was judge judy I would rule for crytek, oops I meant CIG" line

3. He knew that section was there and he's a die hard CIG believer and didn't want to shatter the Reddit Armchair Lawyers ability to argue Space Law on the Subreddit for the next month.

TheAgent posted:

I'm only going to be upset if this doesn't go to an actual courtroom

because I will sit in on this poo poo for reals lol

TheAgent posted:

"god who wrote this GLA, fuckin dumb rear end crytek lol"

"I thought ortwin wrote it..."

"oh, I mean, yeah he probably had some dumb intern do it, no one really reads this things"

D_Smart posted:

My opinionated analysis of the CIG lawsuit response

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/949626014367469568.html

EightAce posted:

Let's not forget that Ben lesnick ( developer ). Played all the sq42 missions long before they switched to lumberyard. He said as much

AngusPodgorny posted:

CIG's argument about the limitations provision is a loser. The first sentence basically says that neither CIG nor Crytek can be liable for any kind of damages, except if there's been intentional or grossly negligent (basically extremely careless) conduct. This is why Crytek littered their amended complaint with 'intentional.' Under a plain reading of the provision, CIG is on the hook for any intentional conduct.

CIG is arguing that 'intentional' is a tort concept, and that the provision really precludes all contract damages. This isn't going to work because the sentence plainly carves out intentional conduct, and they're stuck with the words of the contract. Plus, the idea that you can put something in your contract saying you can breach the contract with impunity is laughable, and a judge would bend over backwards to come up with any reading other than that.

The second sentence only limits Crytek's liability to $1.85million; it does nothing for CIG. It's also badly written, because it removes that cap for gross negligence and says nothing about intentional, despite intentional being a higher level of misconduct. It's also redundant, because the first sentence should limit it to $0 anyway, but maybe it's just being extra careful.

It's possible the first sentence is supposed to apply to all damages other than actual damages, in which case it all makes more sense, but it doesn't say that. Because whoever drafted this is bad at making contracts.

kilus aof posted:

Cultists take headline development to the next level.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/7om9to/man_i_really_appreciate_all_of_those_news_sites/

quote:

"CIG loving shreks all of Cryteks claims in suit."
"CIG Provides Rebuttal: Crytek Claims Systematically Debunked - Legal Drama Unfolding."
“Chris Roberts and CIG teabags Crytek in lawsuit for the ages”
"CIG bitch slaps Crytek lawsuit down like a cheap ho"
"Everything is going pretty good and CIG is handling this very well"
"Star Citizen CRUSHES Crytek's Lawsuit"

G0RF posted:

Once again I found myself watching Brian Chambers conversation with Batgirl about the Lumberyard switch and noticed a couple of new things.

First, when he first hears her mention of Lumberyard, he chuckles to himself.

Second, after he talks about the legal trickiness of the switch, he states that “after everything was inked and dotted” they were finally able to talk about the switch publicly. Presumably, the inking and dotting was with Amazon. Perhaps I’m reading too much in but one assumes the need to not discuss it publicly beforehand was to keep Crytek oblivious to their plans? The switch in itself needn’t have been controversial with backers yet the involvement of lawyers and need to keep plans quiet until after deals were inked seems suggestive that cig’s lawyers knew they were in dicey territory.

Maybe there’s another way to interpret this but that seems like the clearest reading to me.

Scruffpuff posted:

My theory, which my wife also shares, is that the entire thing is a delay while they prepare to scuttle the company. This upcoming paid "tour" might be an alternate way of doing that - give your Amway pitch of newly created shares to the most gullible of backers, then dip.

TheAgent posted:

my in expert legal opinion:

PederP posted:

Against better judgement I will chip in. IANAL, but I have licensed game engines for development and have worked with engine development as well, so I do know a bit. (I have also represented myself in an actual court of law, which was dumb and shall never be repeated). The "exclusive" parts are poorly written, but generally exclusive is used with other wording to give a license which cannot be freely sub-licensed, which cannot be transferred, which does not prevent usage of other engines/middleware/libraries, and which does not prevent the licensor from licensing to other parties. So CIG and CryTek both are trying to have the poorly written contract mean something very different than the original intent and what is normal in licensing. Anglo-Saxon law is weird, with your insistence on sticking to the letter, ignoring the 'bonus pater' concept, etc. so I have no idea what the court will end deciding is the effective meaning of this terribly phrased contract.

Personally, I think the claim is merely there (among others) to get this into court so discovery can proceed, and it can be revealed that CryEngine is still in use. Ie the LY switch is far from fully complete. Which is why a lot of the complaint refers to CIG refers to missing logos, marketing, bugfixes/improvements being sent back to CE, unlicensed disclosure of source code, etc.

The "exclusive" argument is just a battering ram to bring down the gates and get the lawyer army into the castle. And like other battering rams, it does not have any further use and can be unceremoniously dumped at the gate.

Enchanted Hat posted:

Not a lawyer, but I sometimes have to read contracts.

I was interested by the dispute over the CryEngine license being "exclusive", so I looked at the actual license agreement: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15lZBqg7yhDiVgyxTQLfq_ivQu7c-2G6W/view?usp=sharing

The dispute over exclusivity is based on sections 2.1 and 2.1.2. Those sections are not very well written, which is why CryTek and CIG are able to propose wildly different interpretations of what the sections mean.

2. Grant of License

2.1. Grant: Subject to strict and continuous compliance with the restrictions in the Agreement and the timely pament of the first installment of the License and Buyout Fee pursuant to Section 5.1.1 hereof by Licensee, CryTek grants to Licensee a world-wide, license only:

2.1.1. to non-exclusively develop, support, maintain, extend and/or enhance CryEnging such right being non-sub-licensable except as set forth in Sec. 2.6 below;

2.1.2. to exclusively embed CryEngine in the Game and develop the Game which right shall be sub-licensable pursuant to Sec. 2.6);

If 2.1.2 is to be interpreted as CIG making a commitment to use CryEngine and only CryEngine to develop Star Citizen, why does the section say that CryTek "grants to Licensee a world-wide, license" to embed CryEngine in the game? If you commit to doing something in a contract, usually you wouldn't say that you've been granted a license to do it. Usually a license is a permission to do something. A contractual commitment would usually be called an obligation, or the contract would state that CIG must do X, not that they have a license to do it.

If 2.1.2 is to be interpreted as CIG receiving an exclusive license to use CryEngine, meaning that no one else can use it, why does it say that CIG gets the license to "exclusively embed CryEngine in the Game"? CIG gets exclusive rights to the engine, but it's restricted to this one game? What does "exclusive" even mean, then? Who is being excluded from working on Star Citizen? CryTek doesn't even have the right to grant people the right to work on Star Citizen, since that's CIG's IP. This is also a weird interpretation.

I wonder if the section was actually intended to mean something like this:

"CryTek grants to CIG a license to embed CryEngine in Star Citizen. This license does not allow CIG to use CryEngine for any other games (it is exclusively for Star Citizen)."

That would make more a lot more sense than either CryTek's or CIG's interpretations - that it's a license for one game only rather than an exclusive license for CryEngine, and that it's not an obligation to use CryEngine no matter what (which would be very odd for what is described as a "license"). That is not what the license says, though, so we're stuck with the confusing license agreement as it stands.

One thing I'm seeing a lot is "lol, why would CryTek give CIG an exclusive license to the CryEngine? That doesn't fit with their business model, that would be a terrible deal for them! Clearly that's a silly interpretation". I have never been involved in contract disputes like that, but I'm not sure "this is a really bad deal, so that can't be the interpretation" works as a legal argument. The license agreement between CryTek and CIG involves CIG paying millions of dollars for a license to use the CryEngine. If I were someone completely unaware of Star Citizen and I read this agreement without any context, I don't think I'd immediately interpret it the way CryTek does. I certainly wouldn't feel totally confident having to convince a judge and a jury that the exclusivity clause should be interpreted the way CryTek wants it to be interpreted.


tl;dr: I don't think the dispute over the meaning of an exclusive license is a slam dunk for CryTek/Skadden.

SomethingJones posted:

Spent most of the night reading the GLA, skimming the thread and reading Derek's stuff here - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/949626014367469568.html
I have to throw my hands up and say that imo Derek is right on all points:


1. There is no argument that it's an exclusive license. Whether that is determined to be unfair or unenforceable is entirely up to space court. However the money that CIG agreed to pay Crytek is based on the license terms and that's a pretty substantial one - without exclusivity the license fee would have been much, much higher. In other words, "use our engine and no one else's and we'll give you a great deal"

2. SQ42 is defined as a feature of SC. The license does not allow CIG to sell SQ42 as a separate game which they did. There's no getting around that.

3. Amendment to Section 2.1 allows modification to the engine by third parties (not exclusively CIG) as long as it's for the development of SC, ie "being exclusive only with respect to the game". Essentially meaning that third party contractors can modify Cry code without being in breach of the license. I only mention this one as I've seen discussion around it.

4. A press release does not release CIG from the terms of the GLA. I am absolutely dumbfounded that this is CIG's response and that they filed it into a court. Absolutely dumbfounded. There is nothing in the GLA that releases CIG from that contract and CIG have not filed anything to show they negotiated a change to the GLA or had it terminated.

7. If Cryengine had been modified so much that it was considered by CIG to be 'StarEngine', tough titties, Crytek own all those modifications and are free to fold them back into Cry.

8. Switching engine to Lumbaryard is a black and white breach of the contract unless the exclusivity of the GLA is determined to be unfair - HOWEVER! If there was a case to be made for it being unfair CIG could have released themselves from the GLA on that basis before the engine switch. They didn't.


Derek is also pointing out that Crytek selling CIG the royalty license meant that they missed out on a percentage of the $180 million in fundraising, but that's how the royalty game rolls Derek you should know that


I'm not getting where people are coming from when they are saying the GLA is poorly written or open to interpretation, to me it's clear and explicit and the amendments are clear and explicit. If anything wasn't clear and explicit it would be amended and edited until it was and then it gets signed. The license that CIG have for Cryengine is for the development of Star Citizen and nothing else, and if they switch engine they are in breach of the contract on its face. If they want to go down that road and argue that this is an unfair term then:

1. It is a CRITICAL term for valuing the $ amount of the license
2. CIG were free to have it amended at any time in the last 5 years and pony up a space dollah amount to Crytek
3. They went ahead and switched engine and put out a press release saying so WITHOUT a legal determination on the unfairness of this term or anything in writing to Crytek saying it was unfair - because if they did it would be part of their filing right now


If you cannot see how loving totally ludicrous this motion to dismiss is then you simply don't comprehend the english language and I don't know what to tell you. It will actually be torn up on day one. I'm leaning toward Loxbourne's opinion of this being a complete PR move by CIG to keep the shitizens happy being correct.

If CIG don't settle this madness 5 minutes before this goes into space court it means that they simply do not have the money to do so because they have gently caress all else to make a case out of here.

Loxbourne posted:

Now both parties have filed their statements of case, we're firmly into the territory of "will this argument fly with a court?". That's subjective and dependant entirely on the judge and jury's own reactions on the day. We can comment on the evidence, caselaw, etc (and I think there's plenty of scope for a good effortpost or three about the caselaw FFKS are citing on the meaning of "exclusive"), but we are not qualified to say which argument is likely to win. Even if we were, every lawyer's seen a totally bullshit argument unexpectedly work, or an ironclad one fail.

Absent something hilarious happening, the thread's best bet now is to watch, laugh as the citizens all suddenly become experts on the legal definitions of words, and sit tight until discovery. I'm sure there's going to be all kinds of lovely things to comment on if the case proceeds that far.

reddit posted:

So after 6 months of sheer hell ive finally just today managed to get a refund, and it's all thanks to you guys.. Honestly i would have given up and maybe even been made homeless along with my newborn children if you guys hadn't shown me what to do, and given me continuing encouragement when it seemed it was all over.

tooterfish posted:

quote:

If you had to pick one example of CIG's stupidity what would it be?

Star Citizen.

G0RF posted:

In other Batgirl news...



After her two minute tale of errors upon frustrations (clipping errors, dragonflies stuck in scaffolding, broken legs and more) to no end, the punchline:

“and I think that’s a perfect example of why I like this game.”

ewe2 posted:

Toastmannnnn Remix Time!



* Lyrics so you can sing along (they're also in the mp3)
* Now I have to think of a hilarious lawsuit song.
* Genuine shredding Epiphone SG Junior
* No parps were offering motions to dismiss in this recording.

AP posted:

In just a little over five years Cloud Imperium Games have created 1,016 youtube videos, 4 websites and 0 games.

hot balls man no homo posted:

"People are catching on that we're fudging the funding tracker to bolster backer confidence! But we can't remove it without arousing suspicion. What if we redid the whole website and omitted the tracker? Well that would be expensive and time consuming, but what other option do we have?"

Cao Ni Ma posted:

Its blowing my loving mind that they think that they'll be able to implement something they've never loving shown in 6 months when they still need to hammer out so much.

It happens every loving year. CIG starts it by setting up unrealistic expectations to drum up hope to the faithful during the lean months, then they shut up and dont say anything as their self imposed deadlines start to fall apart. They dont need to say anything because by the time the poo poo is hitting the fan its E3/Gamescom and the faithful will just say "Oh wait for Gamescom" and then they fail that and they go "Wait for CITCON" then they fail that and they go "Wait for the anniversary stream"

Its going to be "Shoot at rocks" or "Sit in your ship parked on the moon" while the numbers go up and the faithful will eat it up as revolutionary and never been done before

G0RF posted:

It’s pretty rich that an old “friend of Chris” was employed at Crytek at the time and was party to crafting Crytek’s confusingly written contracts. It seems beneath neither Chris nor Ortwin’s character to collude in a mutually beneficial act of contract sabotage.

Yet at the same time, we have seen over and over and over again how hopelessly incompetent and shortsighted they are. These are people who have months worth of headstarts to prepare for livestreams aimed at tens of thousands whom they’re hoping to filch funds from — and time and again they’ve botched it in ways that baffle the imagination. These are people who write and approve epic meltdowns by their spokesman in response to bad press and thereby turn containable brushfires into raging firestorms spreading thrice as far and fast and burning their own asses in the process.

So yes, it isn’t beneath their character, not in the slightest, but it is unthinkably beyond their competence.

Martman posted:

So we have one faction of goons who are true believers in the Failure of Star Citizen; they don't want this court case to meddle with something they've been waiting years for. And we have other goons who basically just like seeing CIG get hosed over, as long as it's their own fault. I love it.

Jason Sextro posted:

Sarsapariller posted:

All I know is that once this court case dies, Star Citizen will finally be good.

luckily it's literally impossible for anything to be bad for Star Citizen, so I can still dream and have faith

hot balls man no homo posted:

Dusty Lens posted:

I have to admit that I was expecting a touch more noise to emerge from the realization that the only reason this project even exists is due to Crytek bending over backwards to make it happen and really carrying it on their back through all of the most critical early stages.

You really hit on the galling part of this lawsuit. There would be no Star Citizen without Crytek. They would not have made 175 million without Crytek making the demos and cutting them a deal on the engine. Did Crytek do it out of the goodness of their hearts? No, they did it to promote their engine so they could sell it to other companies to make more money. Was it the right engine choice? gently caress no, it's a single player fps engine. Was it the only choice Chris had? Looks like. Everybody else turned him down so it was either signing an exclusive deal with Crytek or going to Kickstarter with a few drawings of ships and the same pitch he gave to all the big publishers when he was trying to get back in to the gaming world. It would have been 0.5% funded and gone the way of a bunch of other lovely kickstarters. Moving to a free version of the same engine was a slap in the face of the people who got you those Porsches, Chris. They're coming to collect.

Mangoose posted:

quote:

Do you think guys like Montoya are going to be okay when Crytek responds with a document that makes it look like CIG is wrong in every possible way? Like... these guys know that right now each side is presenting their claims in the way that makes them sound as unerringly correct as possible, right?

Shhhh! They're so cute when they're dreaming!

Oh, look! That one is kicking! He probably thinks he's clipping through the floor

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Crytek goes to court with a world-renown team of lawyers who literally write the book and the thing they are suing CIG for.

ITS A loving CASHGRAB



Meanwhile, CIG sells a tank that will not be released soon, for their planets that don't work, in a camouflage pattern they have yet to even begin coding into the game.

ITS JUST AN INDIE DEVELOPER LEAVE THEM ALONE!

TheAgent posted:

crytek is a horrible fuckin company that had it's last love from PC gaming nerds a decade ago. they shouted "this, this is what PC gaming is about" over the coil whine of their strained and cum stained video cards running a mediocre FPS at ultra settings

I can't think of a better company to sue chris "savior of pc gaming" roberts. even just thinking about it makes me loving lol

the corrupt idiots at crytek and the corrupt idiots at cloud imperium really, totally deserve each other. maybe the ones at CIG more, since they've actively been loving over just about everyone since the early 90s

Beet Wagon posted:

It appears all is not lost in BDSSEland

TheAgent posted:

bootcha you get your C&D and your notification of breached NDA yet

supposedly it's a clusterfuck of legal kung fu now

quote:

Gloves are off. Ex-employees have been interviewed and told to shut it, including some ex-backers.

Galarox posted:

SomethingJones posted:

Crytek jumped on Chris's bandwagon in 2012 out of sheer desperation to have someone do something original with their jittery clunkyfuck fps engine and I will enjoy watching them gently caress each other over in court. Derek is all in on this lawsuit drama, and if it is settled before discovery with brown envelopes and multiple cheques from various shell companies (usual CIG style), Derek will be eating internet humble for the next ten years.

If Chris Roberts settles this it will be the first out of character thing he has done in 5 years, and it will be the most sensible decision CIG has ever taken. For that reason I fully expect them to not settle and it will go in front of the court as a matter of Chris's ego and to keep the fundraising running for another 6 months.

AP posted:

Slow_Moe posted:

Here is your lovely star citizen leaks rehosted:

https://my.mixtape.moe/ztdmyw.mp4

https://my.mixtape.moe/tsilch.mp4

G0RF posted:

What surely all of us agree on yet probably escapes the fiery, furious eyes of Ortwin and Chris is that the longer they protract and more fiercely they fight this lawsuit, the more they assure that the dominant CIG narrative of 2018 is “troubled project continues legal fight.” It seems obvious and mundane so of course it would probably escape their detection.

Every legal volley, every response and counter, is going to run the gaming media circuit as the last two have. It’s going to prompt new videos, punchlines, gossip and speculation. None of it is positive, unless you count scoring yet another CIG buttkissing montage from goofs like Montoya as a big PR win (hint: you get those for free anyway no matter what you do so it’s non-accretive.)

Croberts68 posted:

I have got all of you beat and it's not even by a little bit.


Lets start at the beginning, I'm a moderately successful guy, I've been lucky to work with some really high quality people who have made me look like an absolute rockstar. I actually even got some decent B-List actors to work for me on a few projects and even got a reasonably hot, albeit failed commercial actress to marry me. I was a movie producer for a minute and even though I lost more money than I made, the "hollywood" contacts I made put me in good enough standing to be able to piggyback smaller amount of funding on to larger projects and turn a pretty solid net.

Problem is my wife really started to just grate on me about her getting work, and the loving Turtle of my RL Entourage kept telling people we were gonna make a big gently caress off videogame. So I'm kinda stuck in a weird spot where I just wanna start funding high budget porno and maybe trade in the wife for a different kind of actress before the money starts to come in and she's entitled to a lot more. Seriously, I've never seen a girl with such a long neck not be able to make it down to the balls, but whatever that's not part of this story. So fuckin Turtle gets me stuck telling potential investors about a videogame that I am literally just making up as I talk to them while throwing out some buzzwords I read in Wired, but the crazy part is they start to eat this poo poo up. Talking about the "upward profit paradigm" in gaming starts to get these loving app developers turned investors as hard as a rock so I see a chance to do something.

So I get Turtle to call some friends and we set up on this website where you make empty promises to nerds and they throw cash at you. So I get a youtube made by my buddy Gil who has a business making music videos for teenage girls who think they're gonna be the next Kesha/Iggy and he green screens my poo poo up so I look like pudgy Scottish Spaceman Spiff. I'm thinking we might make like 2 mil and I can finance a 300K game, pocket the rest and start shooting facial scat porn by Q2 2013. But something far crazier happens, loving nerds start making GBS threads their entire lifesavings on my fiscal chest like some kind of Gordon Gecko inspired Cleveland Steamer. By the end of it I'm sitting on like 12 mil. Nerds, dude. Fuckin nerds.


So Now I'm thinking "How far can I ride this gravytrain before I actually have to do anything?" so I start up my own website, hired some kid out of Irvine of Craigslist to do it (because gently caress Angie's List, I ain't paying poo poo to get some pimple faced kid to poo poo out a paypal button and spaceship drawings) and sure enough I've got 30 million USD and loving Turtle has promoted himself to my assistant. Which would be fine but he keeps insisting on setting up his office near mine but that poo poo's on the East side of the building, so every morning it smells like someone is cooking maple bacon when the sunlight hits his chair. But then the dreams started. I kept having this nightmare where it starts off awesome, I'm banging some coked out 19 year old starlet on a space yacht, but then the space-IRS shows up with my wife, they use her cheekbones to cut through my hull and they tell me I'm going to jail for spaceship-fraud.

So I finally decide to actually make it look like I'm going to make a game and I get my little bro, who's actually a pretty bitchin programmer/producer and I get him to hire a bunch of his work buddies to work in our hometown. But then my loving wife decides that our house in Texas sucks so we have to move back to LA and open an office there so she can "pursue her career", I wanted to tell her they don't make fish-stick commercials any more and no one is going to be casting any parts for "Mostly Fuckable Witch" now that Angie Jolie has fallen to doing Disney poo poo other than the Sci Fi channel. But whatever, LA gets me closer to those desperate 23 year old college drop outs that can pass for 18, so I go with it.

Problem with LA is ol' Turtle decides he needs to still be near me, so I end up realizing the Maple bacon smell from his office isn't from the sunlight hitting his chair, it's from him drinking pancake and bacon smoothies. But now I have to look "active" so I start doing a weekly internet interview where nerds ask me stupid rear end questions about the "game" and I answer them. At first they wanted to have some of the nerds who run the site look at the questions first so they could type up answers for me, but I got bored reading their answers 3 questions in and now I'm making a space game where you can play Call of Duty and the Sims at the same time. Seriously kids, stay away from cocaine, I had to be hit with a tranq dart when someone started to ask me about voxels.

But then after like 20 of these one of the guys working on the game decides I can't be trusted talking to people, so he wants to make a new Youtube show. I figure this is my chance to get rid of my two biggest problems, so I get Turtle and my wife to make this fake news show where they get random nerds from IT and poo poo to talk about spaceships and the right way to draw them or whatever while I go to gaming conventions, where pussy flows like wine if you've got a "Special Presenter" Pass, just wish I could have got on this circuit back when Olivia Munn hadn't yet realized she could do better than videogame news.

It also helps that I'm like 70 million deep at this point too, so I'm actually bagging booth babes, not just the girls with low enough self esteem to dress up like animes and not get paid. So I think "what the hell, lets see what happens when I start selling spaceships I just drew in paint and make my dorky brother actually put them in the game, and the weirdest loving thing happens, I make another 20 million and magazines are writing stories about how much of a genius I am. And everytime I tell some nerd about something, it will always make some other nerds so mad they spend days freaking out on the internet. I'm pretty sure if I announce a partnership with My Little Pony, I could probably make 50 million and cause a few dozen suicides.

gently caress I love griefing

Galarox posted: