Beet Wagon posted:

I absolutely love that Reddit literally can't see the big picture: it's been half a decade and they've only just barely managed to release a buggy, borderline-broken single-mission demo, and it took a one year (and one day) delay just to deliver that.

spacetoaster posted:

They hate him.

spacetoaster posted:

They REALLY hat Chris.

Terebus posted:

Thanks for the effort post in this sea of jankposts! You're a true hero GORF, have a quote.

D_Smart posted:

It would help if you were actually keeping track of the sequence of events and my postings.

If you were, you would know that the excerpt you posted, preceded the performance issue with the 3.0 build.

Dusty Lens posted:

You are the best guy

Variable 5 posted:

I’ve been busy with work and the holidays the past couple of weeks. Is this finally the ELE?

Solarin posted:

lmao

Beet Wagon posted:

Once again G0RF has managed to read the deeper meaning behind my post of "lol look at this dumb boring bullshit" and like a surgeon extract those truths and magnify them to fill a page of beautiful prose.

Just kidding buddy, solid effortpost as usual.

Zzr posted:

I know thanks.

Dusty Lens posted:

Sure make fun of them but Gaijin never figured out how to sell a tank for $100.

Who's the visionary now.

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

It's nuts. If they're implementing ERA then it follows that these future hyper tanks are still lobbing HEAT shells at each other. If you're going to bother modelling HEAT shells then it follows that you have a full armor and internal component modelling on the tank. Their dumb space chariots don't even have that level of detail and certainly don't have any though put into how their internal mechanisms work. You can tell them just by looking at them; there's no commonality of design when it comes to functionality.

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

It's nuts. If they're implementing ERA then it follows that these future hyper tanks are still lobbing HEAT shells at each other. If you're going to bother modelling HEAT shells then it follows that you have a full armor and internal component modelling on the tank. Their dumb space chariots don't even have that level of detail and certainly don't have any though put into how their internal mechanisms work. You can tell them just by looking at them; there's no commonality of design when it comes to functionality.

G0RF posted:

Ha, thanks! I, too, have one mission, s. I just can’t help it and lord have mercy that demo was worse than I ever imagined it could be.

I have a draft effortpost I started early in the year before I’d returned to the thread. I shared bits of it with others a while back but never posted it. It was a theorycrafting analysis, nothing more, and it has holes here and there, and was left unfinished as I had some research to complete and got sidelined. But I’ll throw some of it on pastebin for those curious.

—

In light of today’s livestream, I’d make some refinements and adjustments to the draft but 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.

”It’s so dense.”

Squadron 42 as executed is a brutal cash flow albatross with little reason to exist. And more importantly, Squadron is not what it was planned to be, sold to be, or hoped to be. It didn’t have to be this way. He could have and should have allocated some portion of funds to an entirely independent team with some of the old guard steering it. As a niche title embracing the conventions of old — branching missions, cutscenes, a simple plot with Hamill as the main face/voice and a cast of high talent unknowns — they could’ve nailed it quick, recovered their costs and had the perfect little nostalgia vehicle for the fervent niche of supporters hoping for just such a game. The stakes didn’t have to be raised to ludicrous levels for the title with the lesser potential in the marketplace yet Chris gave it the good old Slocum bear hug and found himself embracing a corpse after. So instead we’ll get Zombie Squadron, the Star Citizen adventure that damns the title to exactly the same miseries of space simdom that Toops excoriates quite often.

In short, “Never go full space with your space game!”

On that note, I find myself returning yet again to the little-remarked upon Brian Chambers / Batgirl exchange in February of this year. It was already noteworthy for its subtextual hints about CIG work culture (and so too for some brief asides about the legal stickiness of switching to Lumberyard) but more and more I find myself just amazed with what the story reveals about (yet again) the Ad Hockiness of CIG’s Development Process.

Brian Chambers tells the story of how Frankfurt created the space for a key developer to, er, create the space via PG. And it’s a cool enough story, giving an employee the freedom to experiment with something they’ve a passion to solve.

Yet once the functional demo was completed and shown to Chris and others, everything changed. Star Citizen changed and more importantly, Squadron changed. What began as a traditional dogfighter presumably with the same game efficiencies of the Wing Commander games or Infinite Warfare more recently was now going to embrace the perils and design burdens of PG.

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. All these projects needed was all that Roberts lacked yet couldn’t see he lacked, can’t admit he needs and can’t perceive his employees deserve. Focus, planning, discipline, scope, humility, trust, integrity. Fate designed so many opportunities in his own eventful life that could’ve served as teaching lessons yet he ignored them all for Folly, and if the wheel of Fate brings him once again to that place he started from, with his Folly once again serving up the middling botch of what was intended as the master stroke to end all master strokes, what might he learn, I wonder?

Dusty Lens posted:

XK posted:

He looks so fat and doughy in that stupid black emo clothing. Wear some decent clothes, gently caress. Trump is a fat disgusting sack of poo poo, but his tailor is a miracle worker, and makes him look great. Get some loving tailored clothing you slob. Or even just a properly fitting button up dress shirt. You have a stylist on staff, for gently caress's sake. Bill Gates looks like he shops at Sears, but at least he doesn't look like a fat ball of poo poo.

Dusty Lens posted:

laden with smoke launchers that lob ordinance the size of a grown man because the scaling is all hosed up.

quote:

From what I saw, I believe that they have another 12-14 months to release a polished game.
...
In today's presentation, I saw, for the first time, a vertical slice for the game I backed in 2012... For a vertical slice, it touched all the elements of a proof-of-concept tech demo for a game.
...
VISUALS: As always, the artists/modelers are at the top of their game. It looks great.... Regardless, the SQ42 set pieces are very nice to look at, and they give you a great sense of immersion in every aspect. The visuals in space and on the ground, were also quite good, and they accurately matched the mission theme.
...
AUDIO: Gamers tend not to focus too much on audio because for some reason nobody cares enough about audio engineers as superstars. But for space games, if you've played Elite Dangerous or spent enough time in Star Citizen, then you know that the audio is great. The audio in the SQ42 presentation really made so much difference that even if the graphics didn't match the audio quality, you probably wouldn't have noticed. Audio makes a BIG difference in games of all kinds. And each score, in every scene was absolutely PERFECT.
...
I saw game levels. I saw cut-scenes. I saw NPC dialogue triggers. I saw space combat. I saw atmospheric flight. I saw FPS combat.
...
And for that, I am going to do everything in my power, and will spare NO time or expense to put Chris Roberts in jail

Spiderdrake posted:

Yeah that's one of the aspects of people (even here) shrieking about how Chris "has charisma" that astounds me. The man looks like a puffy garbage bag full of poo poo with a bloated thumb squirting out the top. He has clearly not matured into an adult, does not understand adult presentation or looking mature. He probably wore that poo poo sans the dual watch when he was 22 and making Wing Commander and never learned from his two decades of failure that followed.

Also yeah Bill Gates doesn't give a flying gently caress. You exist to sell things to him. Not the other way around. He has less than ten conversations a year where the person speaking to him can speak down to him. Chris Roberts entire life from top to bottom is being a shady salesman, the least he could do is go on a diet and put on a real shirt. The guy is equivalent to Vince McMahon, a loving carny, and guess which of them wears real clothing?

big nipples big life posted:

If I could raise my bet to 10-12 million I would.

Sarsapariller posted:

Derek coming through with the compliments today!


Derek, you've made a believer out of me.