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Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

MeLKoR posted:

That's not even the worst, these people are at the stage of retrieving false memories. When the hell did CIG ever mention 2017 during the kickstarter?

Remember when they said that the game practically was one year into the development already when the kickstarter started? The Ministry Of Truth has decided that what they actually said was that it would be out three years later than promised. Probably.

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Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

So… what are the odds that the script is still running? Has anyone over there posted an imgur link that “we” can “accidentally” bring down?

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.


I had one of those. I'm not sure it could actually display that kind of resolution…

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

So has anyone been able to answer how they've managed to take a semi-functional engine (albeit one aimed at spectacle more than anything) and have it be so completely devoid of functionality? What have they done to the poor thing to even make those things happen?

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

AP posted:

The guy has a real bad case of the Citizens.

It's that what we call it now? I mean, you're not wrong, but it's just sad to see such a good word be hijacked and sullied with such connotations. :eng99:

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

joats posted:

Mentally, yeah. He is a loving kid. Look at the poo poo he is putting up on twitter.

By that logic, we shouldn't be ridiculing CRobber either.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

kordansk posted:

What's this we poo poo. Most of us post funny gifs and laugh at the stupidity.

"We" as in those of us who are making fun of Roberts and the waves of stupidity that ripple out from that epicenter.
Looking at what they're posting, they're all dumb kids — that's why we're laughing.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

The Kins posted:

Wait wait wait... I'm a little far behind here. Is this thread fighting the Ku Klux Klan and the Burger King Kid's Club now?

…and the Uppsala mafia.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Bundle of Keys posted:

Who do you need insurance for an internet spaceship?! It's not even a tangible object! :psyduck:

In case it gets blown up in the never-existing game, so you don't have to spend never-existing game credits to pay for a never-existing new one.

EVE has it too, but it exists.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Gabriel Pope posted:

As long as the game doesn't get released, ships can't get blown up. RSI is just delivering on their insurance guarantees to backers.

Aaaah. Suddenly, all those backers wishing that the game won't be released until 2020 makes sense — the longer until release, the better value for money the LTI is. 💡

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

"You want answers?"
"I think I'm entitled to."
"You want answers?"
"I want the truth!"
"That's him in the wheelchair."

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Maldoror posted:

that subtle look of crazy...



Uncanny.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Blue Raider posted:

i havent read this thread today, could somebody explain the wheelchair dude tia

Some guy said “come at me, bro” to DSmart. So DSmart came at him, announcing the fact by “that's him the wheelchair”.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Spaced God posted:

So I haven't paid attention to this new thread. Why are imgur posts getting removed? Other than wheelchair kid, did anything good happen?

Goons see redditors post silly images.
Silly images get reposted on SA for mockery and laughter.
Redditor sees images mocking The Lord and Saviour on SA
Redditor writes a scrape-and-report bot to nuke all images hosted on imgur.
Redditors wonder why their silly images are being mass-reported and removed.
Redditors blame goons.
Goons laugh even harder.

So your last question is answered by the first.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.


Ow. My spleen. I'm broken.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

FireWhizzle posted:

The question we all have to ask ourselves at some point or another while browsing the SC reddit: CYPYTSbF?

Could You Put Your TrouserS back on Fplease?

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

FireWhizzle posted:

I cannot, and Can You Propel Yourself Through Space by Farting:

I stand by my interpretation. It seems like a much more sensible (and probable) thing to say in response to anything reddit anyway. :colbert:

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Paladinus posted:

Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. Ten people. Ten more people. This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people. It would have given me two more. At least one. It would have given me one. One more. One more person. That's him in the wheelchair.

:golfclap:

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Bootcha posted:

Requesting: Goonrathi Search and Rescue logo (1).

For what-now-must-be obvious purposes.

Not what you're looking for, but I was bored/inspired.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Hav posted:

This is an interesting roundup of the problems that CCP faced: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/05/world-of-darkness-the-inside-story-mmo-ccp-white-wolf

Sounds familiar.

I think this section is even more relevant, since it sounds like a fairly close parallel to the designer resignation letter that came out a few months ago, especially when combined with the Escapist rant:

quote:

For the coders there was a constant state of flux. “Almost every system in the game was designed, built and tested at least once, most of them multiple times,” says one gameplay programmer. “Some of the systems were reportedly pretty cool; they had never been seen in MMOs before. The problem was that, without a cogent vision, none of it gelled. There was no clear path towards ‘done’.

"So the team just ended up building stuff and throwing it away, over and over again. It's something I saw on Eve and Dust as well - the teams would build a feature, then be told by management to make ‘small changes’ which necessitated a full, back-to-square-one rewrite.”

This constant build and rebuild approach meant massive issues in the development process. Features that were good enough to retain in one build had to be redesigned from scratch for the next because so many other interconnected parts had changed. Even when there was enough to play, internal testing revealed a confused and unfocused experience.

Most of the sources spoken to for this piece identified the same problematic CCP manager, who had little vision for what the finished game would look like.

“Not once could he answer any question about moment-to-moment gameplay or areas of focus,” says one source. “Instead, he preferred to deliver buzzword-laden rambles… It was not uncommon for him to communicate in onomatopoeia.

“One manager couldn't answer questions on gameplay or focus. I remember him standing over the shoulder of a programmer putting his finger to his lips and saying 'No - make it more... psssshhhh’”
That bit of absolutely astounding direction and management excellence even spawned its own little EVEO meme…

At any rate, the ingredients are eerily similar: split studios, no coherent (or at least cogently communicated) direction, constantly changing end goals, a chest-beating and ego-driven culture. It's almost as if there's a pattern here.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Phil Burn posted:

What I don't get is WHY Roberts is considered such a visionary. For an "Ideas Man", his ideas seem pretty loving generic to me.

This was actually pretty well explained in the previous(?) thread. It's kind of a different take on the whole definition of a pioneer.

It's because his productive period was at a time when PC gaming started to come into its own after a decade of Commodore, Atari, hell even Apple dominance as the “step up” from simple consoles. As such, he took part in defining a genre. What he did was, to be honest, not very good, but it was very new and very cutting edge. He tried a bunch of stuff before it was really possible — half of it worked, half was jank, and all of it was done far better by other a few years later when they had learned from his mistakes and when the hardware and customer base had caught up.

The “visionary” thing in all of this was in part the idea to combine popular design features that already existed into something more cohesive, and in part to put great presentation on it. It didn't really matter (at the time) that the writing has pure hackery and the gameplay was slightly shallower than a puddle on a parquet floor. It was space storytelling fast-food, ready for consumption. It was still new and eye-catching enough to set the tone for almost a decade.

So it seems generic for two reasons: one is that it copied whole-heartedly from existing source material (be it Star Wars and everything that followed or the whole Top Gun/Iron Eagle genre), and the other is that so many other games immediately came along to fill in these newly-created game genres with proper design and storytelling.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Fat and Useless posted:

They raised like 3 million in 2 weeks from the potato how the gently caress did they not pay their bills?

Wait, I missed this. What bills haven't been paid?

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.


Those aren't bills.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

TTerrible posted:

True, sorry. The important thing is they are bleeding money for entirely avoidable reasons.

Yeah, I was just hoping they'd moved on to the next rung in the failscade ladder. Oh well.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

MeLKoR posted:

Can anyone imagine Melinda Gates going on stage and :qq: that people were being mean because it was 2001 and Windows 98 still hadn't come out, what little was seen was complete poo poo and why the gently caress was she Vice President of anything at Microsoft anyway and why was she acting in a Microsoft movie with Gary Oldman now?


e: if Melinda Gates was an "actress" with a couple of spoken bits in Australian movies trying to start her career at an age where hot superstars start finding it hard to get work

Aside from having problems imagining Microsoft, specifically, as one of those “funny” companies, yes. That sounds just like the kind of desperate attempts at executive humour that appear at company rallies to motivate the troops.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Berious posted:

Don't know why. Sure Rome wasn't built in a day, it took two weeks.

They make a good point, though: maybe the people at CIG are just so high that they're experiencing relativistic effects. Time compression makes it difficult to communicate time frames, after all…

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

G0RF posted:

And crowdfunding is no excuse. Harebrained demonstrated exactly the kind of discipline and restraint that Chris has always lacked in their latest Battletech kickstarter. No stretch goals, promises NOT to expand scope beyond what they were pitching. Their project was in fact a passive-aggressive rebuke of Chris Roberts, and the digs made at Star Citizen are hardly subtle, because Harebrained knows the damage that folks like Chris Roberts and Peter Molyneux cause for the reputation of the industry at large.

What makes it even more fun is to look at the history of how HBS arrived at this point. SR:R was following in the over-promising footsteps of that first wave of kickstarters, and about half-way through, they realised this and started cutting back on ideas they had presented during the original campaign. However, they were always very clear about what they were doing and why, so while there was some grumbling, it was almost always of the “…but I suppose that makes sense… fine *mumble-pout*” kind.

Even then, they were fairly clear that SR:R would be a first attempt, with all that entailed, and that SR:DF would be more of the same, possibly improved. And that's exactly what happened. They created an engine and a first attempt at a game, took the lessons and put them into the second game they had promised. Then they repaired pretty much any lingering ill will by handing out SR:DF-DC to pretty much everyone as a final example of “this is what we actually managed to make.”

Then they moved on to SR:HK and took all those lessons to heart to promise a more focused and less experimental high-quality product, only ever promising more polish, and maybe ever so slightly more of the same, rather than piling on more and more features that people were asking for. Then again, by then, people weren't asking that much any more — the backers had learned a similar lesson too.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

Don't worry I think posterity will judge you the winner of this argument

You got some of the words in the wrong order, but yeah.
The winner of the argument has judged him a posterior.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Octopode posted:

You realize at the point that Star Citizen began development, CryEngine and UE3 were the only games in town as far as licensable, high-end engines, right?
The phrase you're looking for is “long since obsolete and about to be replaced”, not “only game in town”.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

EminusSleepus posted:

this is the proper way to do crowdfunding



They're not alone, fortunately. While the Delta Green KS has had some problems with communicating their various pledge tiers, they posted this sobering message at an early stage:

quote:

We get a lot of suggestions that open with "in this other Kickstarter I saw..."; and we're going to stop you right there — in the great scheme of things, our most important mission is to get you quality books. Many other companies chase a growing total to see how high it can go; we are not that company. Many, many (many, many) other Kickstarters end in financial disaster, either through malfeasance, or miscalculation. We've created A LOT of Kickstarters, and we worked hard to make sure we're not hanging ourselves promising something in the tiers that will come back and kill us in the end.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Truga posted:

So, SC using cryengine didn't sound like a bad idea in 2011/12, when UE4 didn't yet exist and unity was still a joke engine for simplistic indie games. IIRC, it was the only "AAA grade" engine able to be licensed back then that didn't have a directx featureset several years out of date.

Unfortunately for crobbits, you need more than just a good rendering engine to make a good game. Add the facts that since Unity 5 released, cryengine is the new comedy option engine and UE4 being better than cryengine at just about everything, plus 20/20 hindsight, and it makes it look even worse.

Even in 2011/12, not picking very-soon-to-be-released UE4 as the future-proofing option was daft. Overlooking Unity at the time might have made some sense, as you point out, but even within the original (laughable) promised timespan for development, betting on Epic's new engine being available in time would have been far lower risk than the already ageing, questionably capable CryEngine.

Considering how quickly some teams have been able to transition from UE3 to UE4, there's a fair argument to be made that little to no time would have been lost at that early stage anyway, even if they would have had to wait.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

peter gabriel posted:

Did uber nerd Carmack have an engine out back then?
Was ID 4 out or something? Could anyone understand it? What the gently caress? Another question?

The idTech 5 (Rage) engine came out in 2011, and primary development of idTech 6 (Doom) was announced later in the year.

SirTagz posted:

Do you really thing that CR would have managed a project backed by UE4 any better? You are only hung up on Cryengine because this name dropping is the only thing you feel confident about from the sidelines.

Of course not. It's more a case of “yet another stupid thing CRobber did” given the options he had at hand, and which is now causing problems four years down the road.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.


:glomp:

Romes128 posted:

its their own engine they've been building since even before they started the funding for ED.
Then again, if Frontier managed to turn the engine at the heart of Kinectimals (2010) and turn it into a space engine for Elite (2014), it just further suggests that maybe the CIG guys simply don't know what they're doing.

Tippis fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Nov 3, 2015

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Bootcha posted:

I'll post lyrics later today.

…and I'll run them through Zarvox. Better that than ending up in the Hague for exposing living creatures to my “singing”. :D

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

kordansk posted:



JPEGs are currently in the Bull trap, but PNGs are heading out of the Bear trap, are starting to get media awareness - now is the time to invest in PNGs.

With that kind of graph, you know it's got to be legit. Investing in PNG now.
:homebrew:

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

G0RF posted:

"Wencome to the Advocacy Office, citizien. Do you have something to report?"



"Um, yes, officer. I'd like to report a crime. See, I spent $2500 on a spaceship and a First Person Universe and I was promised the NPCs would all be dynamic, unique, and would live full lives in "The Verse" and dynamic conversation trees but they all just seem so canned and predictable."

"Please fill out this crime report."

That would be response branch ef1343a9-b1c5-49d4b7ec-3c482af9af27 — see it's so dynamic and unique that it even manages to predict and respond to this thread!

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

EightAce posted:

It would be a Swedish Brew from the region of Upssalla with a 'smooth' body and 'Pale' finish. Also very weak in Alcohol content so Americans can enjoy it without collapsing in a tearful heap of soiled under wear ..after two bottles.

So… this: http://slottskallan.se/folkol-2/

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Renegret posted:

Because of this stupid loving thread, google now thinks I'm a star citizen fan and is showing me news articles about this game god loving dammit I hate all of you



All must suffer.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.


Some pretty nasty jpeg:ed posterisation of what is supposed to be a near-solid white.

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Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Agrajag posted:

BetsyBigTits is my spirit animal

It's really not a very indicative name. She's actually called Tina.

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