Sunswipe posted:

Oh, it was. I can't find the scene on Youtube, but there's a sequence where the good guys have to stay quiet in their spaceship so the space cats can't hear them in the vacuum of space. It's mind-blowingly loving stupid. And I'm pretty sure Ben Lesnick has written at length about why actually, no, it totally makes sense and you just don't understand Chris Roberts' brilliance.

Beexoffel posted:

see
roadmap
frustration
priority
long
work
pushed back
system
time

monkeytek posted:

If they are limited to 50 players max per server. How many instances are they having to spin up for the free fly periods? It can't be a small cost. For that matter I would love to see their AWS bill.

UnknownTarget posted:

Maybe CRoberts worked out (lied) a deal (took advantage of their ignorance) with Amazon to use the servers for free or significantly reduced cost when they moved (dodged) to the Lumberyard (out of Crytek's) license deal.

colonelwest posted:

Jeff Bezos gives Chris server capacity for free, because he believes in THE VISION so much and thinks Star Citizen is humanity’s next evolutionary step.

spacetoaster posted:

OH MY WORD.

Sheesh, this guy.

Anybody got the text? I don't want to try and read a bunch of images.

Pixelate posted:

Chris is the game
Roberts gets hairy

quote:

If you want to encourage me or other developers to answer questions then it helps to not turn around and question people's professionalism or make sweeping statements. If someone did that to you in your job I am sure it would be irritating. I have a thicker skin than most of the developers at CIG, and realize that not everyone is speaking in their first language or realizes how they phrased things may not have been the best, but in general it is best to approach things with constructive criticism, leaving the ad hominems out. You wouldn't be putting this much time into something if you didn't care, so why put energy into posting something that a developer will dismiss because it feels like an attack? I can tell you that being considerate of someone and treating them with respect will get you much further than than being dismissive. The development team reads these forums and other places like reddit, and the community's feedback really helps, but the feedback that gets actioned on, that gets passed around internally and is discussed is the constructive type, not the overly negative type. Just saying something sucks isn't helpful. Explaining why it sucks for that user, and their ideas to potentially rectify it is helpful.

My biggest disappointment with modern internet discourse is that there's a significant amount of cynicism, especially in forum or reddit debates, and a portion of people assume the worst. If a feature is missing, late or buggy it's because the company or the developer lied and or / is incompetent as opposed to the fact that it just took longer and had more problems than the team thought it would when they originally set out to build it. Developers by their very nature are optimistic. You have to be to build things that haven't ever been built before. Otherwise the sheer weight of what is needed to be done can crush you. But being optimistic or not foreseeing issues isn't the same as lying or deliberately misleading people. Everyone at CIG is incredibly passionate about making Star Citizen the most immersive massively multiplayer first person universe sandbox, and everyone works very hard to deliver that. If we could deliver harder, faster, better we would. We get just as frustrated with the time things take. We practice bottom up task estimation where the team implementing the feature breaks it down and gives their estimates of how long it will take them. Management doesn't dictate timelines, we just set priorities for the teams as there are always a lot more things to do at any one time than we have people to do them. We are constantly reviewing and trying to improve our AGILE development process and how we estimate sprints. As the code, feature and content base grows there is more maintenance and support needed for the existing features and content, which can eat into the time a team has for new feature development, meaning you always have the push and pull of current quality of life in a release versus delivering new features and content. The same push and pull exists in the community as there is a strong desire for polished bug free gameplay now but also new features and content, often from the very same people.

quote:

We have also decided we wanted to invest more time into the quality of life, performance and stability in Star Citizen as it is actively played every day by tens of thousands of people

quote:

Star Citizen already has the main gameloops of a space sim; cargo hauling, commodity trading, mercenary, pirate, bounty hunting and mining. Just spending time refining and finishing out these would make Star Citizen with all it's detail and fidelity more engrossing than any "finished" space sim you can play today.

quote:

Switching the roadmap format was something that I made a priority for us at the start of the year when it was clear that the current roadmap format wasn't helping

quote:

I sense from your reply to me that it's the time taken and priorities that you're frustrated with, as you feel like we're focusing on the wrong things. I can see that point of view, but you're looking at it from the outside without the full knowledge of exactly what it will take, and the order it needs to be done in to deliver the gameplay that will set Star Citizen above everything else. This is the game I've dreamed of my whole life. Now I am in a position to realize it, I am not willing to compromise it's potential because it is taking longer than I originally envisioned. What I will commit to, and what is an internal priority is to improve the current gameplay and quality of life as we go, as Star Citizen is already fun in many ways, even if more buggy and not as stable as I would like, and just finishing off and polishing the basics will make it play as well or better than most other games.

I can promise you the gameplay I described is not a pipe dream, nor will it take 10 to 20 years to deliver. I described systems we either have working, or are working on; we've even shown early versions of some of this like fire on Inside Star Citizen. I can't promise you exactly what quarter it will come together but once the new Road Map web work is done you'll be able to see the teams progress to achieving what I describe in real time.

Zwiebel posted:

Star Citizen is the video game re-enactment of Sunset Boulevard.

Croberts is Norma Desmond.
The backers are Max.
Sandi is Joe.

Sunswipe posted:

Oh, it was. I can't find the scene on Youtube, but there's a sequence where the good guys have to stay quiet in their spaceship so the space cats can't hear them in the vacuum of space. It's mind-blowingly loving stupid. And I'm pretty sure Ben Lesnick has written at length about why actually, no, it totally makes sense and you just don't understand Chris Roberts' brilliance.

colonelwest posted:

Jeff Bezos gives Chris server capacity for free, because he believes in THE VISION so much and thinks Star Citizen is humanity’s next evolutionary step.

The Titanic posted:

I liked his post because it showed that Star citizen will never be a CIG product. It's a CR product. If they lose CR they're going to lose all that sweet backer money also.

And this isn't a dream so much as a kick the can down the road as long as possible. And yes, they can continue do that.

Nothing says they are making a fun experience where an inordinate amount of time is spent talking about how a bullet will pierce a ship and affect a system and eventually it will break and people will have to put on suits to go solve the problem while argon levels are going bonkers.

Like the thought here is that in a fight, one bullet is going to cause this cascade of gameplay things you see.

Like the guy attacking you is just going to stop because his one bullet hurt you, and give you time to do all this movie-level stuff that will never happen.

What will happen is ships will shoot at each other until one of them goes boom. I guess in the aftermath the one that didn't go boom can do all this great cinematic stuff and heal their ship in a super tedious way... but what about your second battle?

What about the 100th kill you've made, and you know that you have to climb back into your suit to get to the no pressure zone to hold you mouse button down on the damaged component until a "fixing" bar goes to 100%?

Everything CR has ever said sounds great until you actually put it into context of a video game. Where you have to do "some action" pretty often. Everything he describes is a movie thing. Where the heroes do it exactly once, and it has meaning because "drama".

But in a video game, where you could be replaying the same movie sequence over and over 100's of times or more... it's not so awesome.

But that would take somebody asking CR about how he sees this stuff going down for like your dozenth fight, and how that's going to be fun to keep people playing the game and how it will somehow all tie back together. Maybe in like some kind of design document or something where all this is laid out and makes sense.

It's all good though. This stuff isn't made to be fun, it's made to make it sound like it's something more than it is (hitting use on a broken piece of wall until it is healed).

Nicholas posted:

Not only have the been working on a new roadmap since January, but it's actually been a TOP PRIORITY from Crobbear himself.

A ROADMAP

TOP PRIORITY FOR THE LAST 10 MONTHS

10 YEARS INTO DEVELOPMENT

IT STILL DOESN'T EXIST

quote:

A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, irresponsibility, and greed.

UnknownTarget posted:

Was watching a video breaking down QAnon (skip to 37 minutes inhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44) and they said that the saddest part about confidence scams was that the people most invested are the most ardent defenders and that they push away everyone who doesn't believe to the point that they only socialize with other believers. Then I thought of Star Citizen.

quote:

Well, here we are, 5 years after we initially Kickstarted Descent Underground.

Thanks to all of you, we raised more than 600k, and off we went, believing that a Descent re-imagining deserved as much effort and support as possible.

Clearly we would not be able to do a triple AAA game as those run in the 10s of millions, but we thought why not a triple III (Independent) game? Where we get a very high end Independent game! We all decided to work towards that goal, making individual sacrifices along the way to make it happen

Eventually we signed with a publisher to help us have as wide a launch as possible, and to get console versions of the game. Heck, with cross play on consoles and cross promotion it might help launch Six DOF back into the mainstream - which was our team's biggest hope.

However, as we got to the end of primary game development and about 2-4 weeks from our Beta release to early backers a dispute arose with the publisher.

This has since lead to a lawsuit and our counter lawsuit. Now, I am not going to disparage, or say whom is right or wrong, Here is the the link to all the court filings if you feel like reading them for yourself and making your own conclusion about the state of things.

All I can say is our entire team is committed to getting our work out to those of you who backed us - and have been so danged patient. We just need to get through this legal process first and settle on whom gets to do what.

Also, there is a matter of the Descent trademark, a few weeks after the dispute, the trademark license with Interplay ended.

So, once the court rules - the publisher of the game will need to re-enter a license agreement with Interplay for the rights to call it a Descent product.

If no agreement is reached, the game could be released as the original pre-kickstarter title "Ships that Fight Underground" or something else, as Descendent Studios owns the assets and the game IP. Our strong preference of course, is to re-engage Interplay and procure another license and release as a Descent product - that will need to be negotiated after the court has their say in the dispute listed above.

Here is a video that shows some of the first mission (didn't want to spoil it for you by showing too much, like where secrets are hidden etc). So, we do jump around a bit, the full first mission takes about 20-25 minutes for most people as they find their way. As a heads up, this is not a marketing video, it is meant to show you some of the flow of how you get in and out of missions, as well as a little bit about the customization options of ships. This is all just captured from one of our latest builds.

There are 4 levels of difficulty, our player chose to play as a "rookie" which is honestly pretty easy, but there are 2 levels above that which get much more challenging for those looking for a bot smorgishborg! However, we can't have our own player die in our video (or can we??? BWAHAHA)!

At the end of the video, we show a few of the ships available to earn (20 total), most of which are customizable. We have 17 missions overall, (one is for training) an estimated 30-40 hours of single player story based content, unlimited vs bots action as well as survival mode and in addition, we have more than a dozen multiplayer maps with so so much more game play.

We are very proud of what we have accomplished, we just so desperately want to get it into your hands. It has been a long time since the last update, but we were frankly worried about what we can and can't say when engaged in an active lawsuit. And, nothing much is happening until it is resolved. However, our lawyer informed us that a post that is informational only would be fine.

So, I know it is a lot to ask, as your patience has been tested, but hopefully it will work its way through the legal process soon, and the game will get released. I believe everyone wants that!

See you in the mines!

Descendent Studios Inc.

PS. If you have any questions and I can legally answer them please put them in the comments below and I will try my best.

Awesome! posted:

thats always a good scene in ww2 submarine movies

DigitalPenny posted:

remember when ship were so slow to make because they needed to get all the damage states in an all this other super tech jazz. Imagine having to go back and redo the 1000 ships or what ever the have released to add air pipes into them.

Thoatse posted:

...in other failed Kickstarter news, an update on Descent



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kAV_hmVpiU

Sammus posted:

This right here was the first thing to go through my mind when I read Chris' bullshit.

All the ships they've made need to be completely redone with these new components and vents and poo poo. How much work, how many years, is that going to take? Wouldn't it have been significantly easier to build all these gameplay elements and then the ships? I guess not, Chris knows best.

Sammus posted:

This right here was the first thing to go through my mind when I read Chris' bullshit.

All the ships they've made need to be completely redone with these new components and vents and poo poo. How much work, how many years, is that going to take? Wouldn't it have been significantly easier to build all these gameplay elements and then the ships? I guess not, Chris knows best.

colonelwest posted:

In a recent video, they already committed themselves to redoing all of the ship cockpits with a bunch of fully interactive buttons, because I guess Chris saw a video of MS Flight Simulator or DCS. So, add it to the pile of technical debt. Some Citizens are now talking about a 2027/2028 release date, seems too optimistic to me.

colonelwest posted:

In a recent video, they already committed themselves to redoing all of the ship cockpits with a bunch of fully interactive buttons,

downout posted:

Inspector Gesicht posted:

If WC4 only made it's budget back why was WC:P made?

Beexoffel posted:

content ^gets everyone
see gameplay
working things
_{management sucks}

Ms. Chanandler Bong posted:

I like how no one on spectrum ever mentions the redundancy and outdatedness of the engine if it does release, as some backers now seem to accept, after 2025. It's like it's an inescapable truth that just can't be got around with any mental gymnastics, so they just pretend it's not a factor. Like having old tech with relatively poor graphics and terrible optimisation isn't a thing.

Edit: somehow beaten by basically same post above

downout posted:

This looks like shite, but I mean on 600k that seems reasonable?

Inspector Gesicht posted:

If WC4 only made it's budget back why was WC:P made?

stingtwo posted:

Started development before wing commander 4's release, so the shoddy sales of wc4 and the death of FMV cutscenes hadn't been known.

Bootcha posted: