happyhippy posted:

For E3 last July, David Braben of Elite Dangerous turned up in person to talk about his game. He flew from England.
For Star Citizen they got a video of Chris in his mocap romper diaper, saying how busy he was doing mocap stuff to appear.
E3 and SC are both located in LA.

pun pundit posted:

World of Tanks developer Wargaming has been going to great lengths to not nerf tanks they have sold for real money. This is because in the EU, lowering the value of a digital good sold is legally actionable.

Think about what that means for "everything is subject to change" Star Citizen ships. Like the Constellation Phoenix that was sold as having a more powerful power plant, now it has a tiny extra power plant instead. That's legally actionable.

Sarsapariller posted:

Here, let me just compare and contrast design documents and reality for more-or-less everything they've actually implemented. Perhaps we will see a pattern start to emerge.


Ship Components- Design: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12936-Engineering-Ship-Components-Systems
Ship Components- Reality: You can drag-and-drop some guns and shields onto your ship in a confusing menu where half the time things don't work right. They may or may not appear in-game. No other components do anything.

Shields- Design: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14489-Shields-Management
Shields- Reality: You can kind of move power around but really nobody ever does that because ships are so flippy-spinny that you are unlikely to get shot from the same direction twice. Shields on big ships take 5+ minutes to charge.

Repair- Design: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/15062-Ship-Repair-And-Maintenance
Repair- Reality: Land on a platform and a drone fixes your ship automatically in seconds.

Medical stuff- Design: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/14318-Healing-Your-Spacemen
Medical Stuff- Reality: You can grab a health pack in certain stations and then press a button to make your health number go up.

FPS Stances- Design: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/14653-FPS-Stances-Breathing
FPS Stances- Reality: You can crouch or lie down because those are pretty much default cryengine poses.

Rental Credits- Design: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/14502-Rental-Equipment-Credits
Rental Credits- Reality: You have to complete a game of Arena Commander to even earn any REC and that's a 40+ minute endeavor, assuming good copilots and your game doesn't crash. At the end of it you will get maybe 1500 REC. You need 15,000 to rent a ship. Good loving luck. (Also you can't do any ship rental in-game, it's all through the website)

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Sounds almost as much fun as the mining gameplay.

EVE Online: Find asteroid. Target asteroid. Activate mining beams. Get minerals. Sell minerals on market.

Rebel Galaxy: Find asteroid. Aim mining beams at targeting points. Fire mining beams. Tractor in minerals. Sell minerals on market.

Star Citizen: Find asteroid. Scan asteroid to find center of mass and scan for analysis impact point. Fire analysis missile, manually guiding into indicated angle and location of impact. If analysis package insertion is successful, utilize mining beam to cut apart asteroid as guided by the material concentrations determined by the analytical materials processor. Avoid tragedy by using exothermic reaction detector to precisely determine beam power and avoid inadvertent explosion from thermally sensitive materials while simultaneously using laser seismometer to avoid detonating shock sensitive materials. Use fragment scanner to determine chunks of interest and then use a combination of tractor and repulsor beams to precisely control fragments of interest into input port. Optionally use refinery to control a series of specialized processing units to extract minerals of interest and reduce cargo space. Sell minerals on market.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Or sabotage it. I wonder what happens if you start shooting these asteroids which will apparently catastrophically explode if hit with too much energy.

Mirificus posted:

https://forums.robertsspaceindustri...ion-for-balance

Ledenko posted:

When this steaming shitpile collapses in on itself, is it actually going to make gaming history or is it just going to be a footnote? Who is honestly going to be suprised apart from the die hard whales?

drat Dirty Ape posted:

It doesn't take much of a stretch to realize how much most of the rank-and-file workers must loathe upper management by now. They have already had loads of people leave 'senior' and 'executive' positions, which are likely the ones that most directly have to deal with Roberts and his constantly changing vision. I mean, just imagine you are an industry professional trying to get a real game created and you see Roberts go in front of all his fans and promise hunting birds on procedurally generated planets (or whatever). Everything about it is just ridiculous. I can't even imagine the hell of working for the CIG CS department under Sandi.

That Works posted:

Kinda sad that they have obviously spent so much money on their facilities etc and are having these kind of problems. Wouldn't like a CFO or someone step and and say "uh hey guys we can make do just fine with a room full of Ikea desks here instead of a $20,000 table"

Ilustforponydeath posted:

I know this, yet it didn't stop me from putting about thirty bucks into the harebrained mechwarrior kickstarter.
Nostalgia.

Dapper Dan posted:

No, they acquired the license. MWO is different from Battletech Kickstarter.

EDIT:


I didn't know that, that is pretty cool

MedianZetaMaleGoon posted:

What do goons think about the potential of this Worlds Adrift game?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZysNm7FDDYc

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

Honestly this looks better than Star Citizen if they flesh out the combat and stuff.

Is there a separate thread for that game? if so plz link me.

MedianZetaMaleGoon posted:

Hmm yeah that's a pickle if there's no money there's no dev team, and no AAA game. They should do a kickstarter or somethin

Mirificus posted:

References ToS in response to Star Marine timeline

Mirificus posted:

I have no words...

The French Army! posted:

Fortunately we've got records all over the internet of the poo poo they promised. When they blame Derek and us goons for the collapse they're not going to be able to stand up to the scrutiny because they've spent the last three years shooting themselves in the feet.

A Neurotic Jew posted:

So a dude named Kyle Bromley, an Illfonic employee, posted this a few hours ago:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0EaVG


Sure looks nice!

Scruffpuff posted:

This mystifies me as well. The development world has grown since then. Consider back when he made his last even semi-successful game, and how different the PC technology was. There are small indie developers who, today, have made more complex and engrossing games than anything Chris has ever made. The fact that he's been out of the industry as long as he has means a lot in a field that evolves and grows as quickly as this one. It's like giving a guy a job building a nuclear submarine because 20 years earlier he made one out of Legos, but nothing since. He's uniquely unqualified to do this. You could almost randomly pick another developer who actually has recently made and shipped a game and have the likelihood of success increase.

A Neurotic Jew posted:

star marine thread closed!


https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/6316962/#Comment_6316962

Surprised it took as long as it did

Mirificus posted:

I've found someone who cares about Squadron 42

Scruffpuff posted:

It's intended to give the illusion of open development. What it really constitutes is a form of public brainstorming - not the same thing. Open development would be showing systems in development; you know, something like a PLAYER INVENTORY which we still do not have any details on, spreadsheets about how the economy is planned, showing completed game maps etc. Open development would say what the backer money paid for (this is NOT the stretch goals page - that is just a bunch of bullshit they made up as a way to show incoming cash "unlocking" content - most of those systems have not been fleshed out or designed beyond the words on that page). Open development would have made it obvious over the course of 2015 that Star Marine was not coming out. They didn't just suddenly know that two weeks ago. That might have been when they made the call, but with open development, the backers would have been there right alongside them, seeing the increasing difficulty. They could have said things like "Star Marine as originally pitched might have to be rethought" and so on, taking months to show the direction it was going and why it was probably going away.

Open development would have follow-ups on earlier stuff. "Remember that thing we showed you last week? These 2 parts didn't work, so we took them out. Here's what it looks like today. Here's what we're hoping to show you next week." And then show it.

Instead of all that, it's just people sitting around talking about what might be cool, just casually shooting the poo poo. Nothing talked about is necessarily related to the game, and nothing in the game is necessarily talked about. In the same way they tossed out the PTU and said "gently caress you, no more refunds, and here's Star Marine btw", they toss out these videos and say "here's your open development, fuckers."

DOMDOM posted:

Werner is clearly the only one who could do this justice.

Vire posted:

Excuse me sir they are blockers not bottlenecks.

Kramjacks posted:

I tried the alpha, it was pretty boring. Funny thing, I recorded some of it with Shadowplay, and the files are labeled "Squadron 42 - Star Citizen".

No Mods No Masters posted:

poo poo man I'm still waiting for someone to explain the lore behind this space fish 'presentation'

WebDog posted:

Someone was asking why CryEngine was bad?

You have to remember CryEngine started off as an Nvidia funded tech demo called Dino Island which was then further developed into Far Cry, capitalising on Halo's features like limited weapons and vehicles with bouncy suspensions and turrets.
Since then all further iterations of the engine, namely through the Crysis series, has simply been to add more gloss, change the scenery and to live up to it's name of "MAXIMUM GRAPHICS!" that you show off on your sweet new rig.

As a game engine, it's design means it can't do much more than provide pretty vistas for a player with a gun to run around in - and even then that wasn't so slick until UbiSoft refined that in the Dunia engine for the Far Cry sequels.

Asset creation is the engine's downside as much of it relies on keeping to rules which if broken means hours of work can get lost, especially with complexities like mo-cap. Even modders have given up and changed to Unreal as they quickly hit walls as they discover there's no way to really create anything outside the engine's box.
It's why every FarCry game is a new hat as the engine is one precious slowflake - everything in SC is going against the engine's grain and it's not happy.

When you're parrrping about in space, remember you are looking at a world where the land and water has been switched off (it's a toggle in the level setting) and the gravity set to 0 to try and simulate space within a 16km sized box - anything beyond that and the engine will bug out.

That vicious object pop-in you see from quickly moving your head across is likely from the developers being forced to switch off everything that's outside the player's view to keep rendering at some speed - which gives an idea how badly optimised this game engine is - even when it's running with top of the line rigs.

The ships flying apart and bouncing across the world are from each craft being a Chinese puzzle of bounding boxes crossing their streams as they try to accommodate sectional damage effects in a lagging engine. It's why you see destroyed ships drop straight down in space and loose inertia as the game swaps the player model with destroyed parts that don't inherit physics properties of the parent object and revert back to the engine's default physics rules - because that's what the engine tells it to do.

And it's taken them four years to even accept something isn't quite right as they try to solve this Byzantine riddle of physic sub-engines cancelling each other out because something like a gun turret would potentially be too heavy for the ship to lift off or knock off the balance of the ship.

By comparison Unreal and Unity are created as a platform to develop something from the base engine. Each iteration tries to provide more with less; taking into account how people have developed games to prevent less of the stuffups that CIG are having.

AP posted:

Moogle posted:

If they're closing things for not understanding development, they also need to close one million accounts, fourteen companies, four studios and Chris Roberts' mouth.