Star Citizen: Big MoMA's House

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > Star Citizen: Big MoMA's House

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

I made it to the end of the thread. Have a catte.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 16:44

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:00

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

KiddieGrinder posted:

I want to poke its tongue.

edit: also since that cat is probably under 18, keep it well away from Seraph.

Me too but I just take in the magic moments when her tongue's sticking out. Will be sure to keep my whole household away from seraph.

I've never seen a thread with so many deranged lunatics before. It's really something.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 17:25

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Eonwe posted:

Honestly, I wouldn't say the combat is great. Its plays like Diablo II in some ways. The only reason I recommend it is because its full loot and even for a gaming community the people are incredibly thin skinned.

I wouldn't recommend buying in. I'd just wait till launch in early 2016 when it launches F2P, but you can also get into the beta and get some funbux to spend for $30 if you desperately want to.

Did they change the territory pvp from 5v5 arena to open world sandbox pvp?

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 01:41

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Mirificus posted:

Between Reddit and Twitter, I'm beginning to get the impression Karl is far more interested in Derek than Star Citizen itself.

Sadly Derek seems to create more entertaining Star Citizen content than Croberts does.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 04:20

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

FrankieGoes posted:

Hahaha, Star Shitizens are poors.

But why also middle eastern?

Maybe expat workers in the middle east are really into spaceship jpgs.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 04:31

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Raskolnikov posted:

I loving love my cat.

Great catte.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 18:15

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Rad Russian posted:

Well someone linked to their forums and people at $500-900 pledge levels are scrambling to buy more jpegs to get to the $1000 threshold to pick up the stupid card before they "run out" on Sunday. It's a clever tactic to get more money from the imbeciles. And they happily get to claim that they're not making any profit off the actual $10 of that card cost, it's simply to benefit all the fans!

Gotta say, if this is Sandi's idea, she's putting on a masterclass on how to separate nerds from their money.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 18:41

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

grimcreaper posted:

Imagine Chris Roberts sex life. Having to RP a person who thinks Sandi is a good actress. Having to RP that Sandi is good at anything actually... Thats depressing to think about.

Goons' insistence on bringing up Sandi's sex life in this thread is pretty disturbing.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 00:09

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Is there a podcast I can listen to for audio equivalents of star citizen backers insane defensive posts?

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 18:34

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

The Saddest Robot posted:

Don't forget the costs involved with hiring all those actors.

Is there a good educated guess on how much their celebrity actors would cost? Seems insane to me that they'd get Gary Oldman for a Kickstarted space sim game.

Edit: I wonder how long your average whale is willing to wait for the PU to come out in a vaguely playable form before they start to panic? How can they buy that the PU is in the QA phase when they refuse to release any footage of the game play in action.

walruscat fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Nov 12, 2015

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 20:19

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Loiosh posted:

That's a perfectly valid opinion. I mean, if you guys would like me to stop replying, I will do so. I've been enjoying the opportunity to chat here, but if I'm disruptive I'm willing to leave.

I'm curious, are you okay with them having spent 10% of their backer's money on motion capture for Squadron 42? That is assuming the 10+ million figure is correct?

Wouldn't it make so much more sense to build a functioning game and then if you have money left over, maybe spend some of it on good motion capture and voice acting?

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 23:23

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Mirificus posted:

Please help me TcM decipher their confusing feelings:

He feels like he is cheating on SC by feeling like this towards ED. He is anthropomorphizing his games. Sandi should really get on those spaceship body-pillows.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 23:28

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Mirificus posted:

That reminds me:

Holy poo poo that is amazing. I hope he's on probation for writing graphic man on ship fan fiction.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 23:42

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Loiosh posted:

There's two interlaced questions to untangle. #1 is if spending 10% of income on a mocap studio + actors and the basically over a normal action film length of shoot (88 days?) is a good idea. My answer to that is that it really depends on the result. If there was a Last of Us or Witcher 3 level of quality that came out the other end, then hell yes. I don't believe Chris has those talents, so I'd say it's way on the high end. I think it's wasteful, but not a critical level of failure like say, the plot in Fallout 4. (At least they are finally making good use of their mocap studio, even if they're still hampered by legacy cruft).

In conclusion, I think it's wasteful.

#2 is about how to build a functional game, which is a different discussion.

I mentioned earlier on in the thread that mocap is useful, but it is best used when you have your skeleton and rigging nailed down. Once you have that done, there's no reason not to do the mocap shoot while other work is being delivered (in this case, $$$$ jpegs and the back-end work on the persistent universe poo). Most games do their shoots while in production once they have the character rigs finished as the mocap cleanup team will do a much better job if their temp model will match with the final. Nothing's worse than having to go back in and fix the cleanup because a change in the skeleton hosed up your controls. (This is an anecdotal account, I have a friend who works mocap cleanup in the mobile space).

That doesn't quite answer the jist of your question which is, is it wise to spend 10+ million while you are uncertain you will have enough income to finish a game? If you take the view that they are a month away from failure (according to Derek Smart's earlier blog), then that would be a certain no. I see that the evaluation has changed to be six months (so June 2016?) and in that case, it would still be a no. It's not wise. If, however, they have a budget for this, then I do not see it as a problem. But, that requires them to actually deliver the product which they have no plan or ability to do for what, another year (supposedly SQ is 2016?). If I believe they have the budget to get SQ42 delivered, then I would not see an expenditure like this as a problem.

From what I said above, you can see I'm uncertain on this, and I think $10 million is wasteful.

I'm curious, is the skeleton and rigging separate from the engine? Like if you built the skeleton and rigging in a 32bit engine, will it break if you convert the engine to 64bit or decide to use an entirely different engine?

Also I get working in parallel while you build everything else, but given their apparent lack of progress it seems incredibly wasteful to spend money they may end up needing to deliver a finished product.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 23:54

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Who is the token in

Sappo569 posted:

Surprise, token is back

And Sandi with the usual indoor sunglasses

Who is token? What's his job there?

# ¿ Nov 13, 2015 21:47

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Amarcarts posted:

Does it seem weird to anyone else that they are making all the ships first and then the gameplay environment? Like why not make one fighter, one medium multicrew, and one large multicrew and let that be it for a while while you get everything else working. Then when you are happy with the technical aspects you go into hiring overdrive on the artists and pump out assets.

They can sell the ships now and keep their ponzi scheme a float. There'd probably be less interest in ship sales If they held off on making ship models.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2015 02:04

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

ZenMaster posted:

Wouldn't selling new ships at 1-2 bucks a pop be more lucrative than hundreds? I mean, if every backer bought a new ship (if it was made affordable) when it came out that would be a million bucks, but funding is nowhere near that.

Or is it epeen to have $pace$hip$?

Oh man... it's epeen.

You can easily make more money on a product by selling fewer units at high prices. It just depends on the type of customers and your product. They sell their ships like Hermes sells Birkin bags. Keep the supply low and people will pay much higher prices for exclusivity in their owner club.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2015 16:48

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Loiosh posted:

I kinda rambled a bit because I loved the beta in WoW. The alpha, what was available in 2003, was not in a good state. When they completed work on the engine (converting it from the RTS overhead War 3 engine to a third person MMO engine), it was in a bad state. Lots of crashes, server completely unstable, no questing, no AI for the NPCs or enemies, you couldn't talk or interact with them, the loot system wasn't working and there was no talent system to speak of. Even the classes were not developed at the time. That's around 3 years into development. The art team was working on assets, but they had to iterate on them because the engine would change and they'd have to redo things. Just as an example Blackfathom Deeps had a complete art redo during beta. There's a lot of fascinating information on the development of WoW which gives interesting insight into what development was like during alpha and beta releases. Once you get an engine features nailed down, the progression is remarkable. Here's a series of articles about it: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/27/wow-archivist-recapping-classic-world-of-warcraft/

0.6 introduces the 2nd pass of Blackfathom Deeps: http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/07/the-patches-of-yesteryear-patch-0-6/ before it would be later moved to its final position and retuned.

Anyways, that's just a specific story from one development. I remember back then how people were saying a lot of similar things, both that WoW was doing nothing innovative, but was buggy and terrible and how dare they take so long to work on it. Instancing wasn't new, Anarchy Online had that! Seemless zone loading wasn't new! Gryphon flights were not impressive, gently caress Blizzard taking forever.

The best part was after launch. Who here remembers the game being unplayable for a month because they ran out of units and they couldn't spin up enough servers to handle the load? Also, you could crash a WoW server (and net yourself a ban) by bringing a bunch of players into an area. The launch version didn't include server sharding (that would be added in BC after the fiasco that was the AQ opening and the servers constantly breaking during that event: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/19/wow-archivist-the-gates-of-ahnqiraj/), so if you wanted to troll, just get a group of about 60 players together and go run to Stormwind. Horde players used to love doing this.

Basically, from doing a lot of MMO testing, I've seen a lot of buggy messes get fixed as the engine issues get sorted out. WoW was no exception and SC is going to be just as much as a poo poo-show, save that people will actually get to watch it in action during its development (at the time, WoW was under a strict NDA).

I think a huge issue with your comparison is that blizzard had a track record of making some of the most beloved and successful pc games of all time before making WoW. They were also fronting their own development money. So the success of the game really mattered to them. They had a reputation to maintain and had their own money on the line.

Chris Roberts was out of game development for over a decade, did not have a sterling track record and didn't have his own money on the line. The pledge money he got was like a lottery ticket. He never felt like he earned it because he really didn't. He lucked into it. So he spent it frivolously on things he would enjoy like hanging out with Gary Oldman.

If you want to raise examples of other kickstarter with similar problems to start and successful ends, that'd be great. But the comparisons you raise don't really stand up to scrutiny.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2015 04:48

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

AP posted:

Reminder.

So what exactly do they spend these thousands of hours on their concept jpegs? Has CIG Actually said they spend these hours or was it just made up by a citizen?

# ¿ Nov 24, 2015 19:07

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

I wonder how much it would cost to just make a barebones engine that allows for multiple occupants in a ship, localized physics and the other ingredients necessary to be able to move from ship to ship and kill mans while a space fight is being simulated all around you.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2015 21:42

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Michaellaneous posted:

A whole engine? Probably quite a lot

Whatever it takes to simulate the game play with some pretty basic graphics.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2015 21:50

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Daztek posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amtBUkmHS0w

A space game in space with spaceships that actually looks fun. You'll need an Oculus Rift so it's about the same price as a Star Citizen jpeg.

That's not a true pre-alpha though. That's probably a sigma build and its been in development since May 2003.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 18:00

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

CashEnsign posted:

So one of my Corp mates suggested I do this and I'm mentally preparing myself for the shitstorm of comments to follow, but long story short my soon yo be ex wife is extremely needy and unable to occupy her time without a man in her physical presence. At first this was awesome, but as Eve became more intriguing to me she became upset. I've tried to explain to her that I use eve to help with my ptsd from the war... As opposed to running outside doing some stupid poo poo and getting arrested.... So here I am now letting it all out on the line. I've spoken to close friends and Corp mates and most have had a similar sentiment... gently caress her she's no good regardless of what she looks like. So Ask Me Anything. oh and since people have asked this is what she looks like http://imgur.com/SLHVMZx

E/N is that way. Also if that picture was meant just for you (and it sure looks like it), you are an rear end in a top hat for posting it.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2015 04:46

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Dirty Hairy posted:

To be fair, Elite: Dangerous is the fourth game in the series and launched its Kickstarter on November 5th, 2012. Not fourteen years ago.

Elite: Dangerous had been in development for 14 years the same way Mad Max: Fury Road was in development for 30 years. Measuring development from the date of release of the last game in the franchise is loving weird.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2015 04:55

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

Merry Christmas thread. Here's my jpg gift to you.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2015 17:06

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

I can't wait till CIG announces a collector edition version of SQ42 with an exclusive jpg and charges full price for current backers.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 15:22

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:00

walruscat: Apr 27, 2013

fuzzknot posted:

Times six. That was the first thing I showed Bootcha how to make.

You may want to use fewer beets than I did, and possibly a different lettuce and/or less of it. It's a big loving salad. Then again, feel free to use a wagon of beets. Ahem.

Bootcha, we need to do Indian food. Specifically this.

From the sound of your posts, this is how I imagine Bootcha cooking:

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 14:51

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > Star Citizen: Big MoMA's House