Bootcha posted:

Goonettes and Gentlegoons, in preparation for my last, final, Star Citizen video, I have one thing to ask of you.

Your screeching, nails-on-chalkboard, horrific, out-of-tune, dying cat, terrible singing voice.

Please turn your attention to this audio file, Guideline.mp3
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f7sfrtqzzblfdgw/Guideline.mp3?dl=0

See where I'm going?

Awhile ago in the Goonrathi forums I was going to put this together, during more optimistic times, but it got shelved. Now, I think it a fitting end to my involvement with Star Citizen.

If you would like to participate, please select a line from the lyrics below, record it in mp3 format, upload it to a dropbox, and post me the address to download.

If you do record a line, please include one chours and one 3x chourus.

Should you need a backing track, turn to this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfxyJZ0ry7k

ShredsYouSay posted:

is there a way to listen to something while recording. dumb audacity.

Matlock Birthmark posted:

Woh now, I'm going to need to stop you right there. I'm afraid the Star Citizen thread just can't contain both catte.jpg and bird.jpg. Please redo your bird.jpg.

Now if it was a concept of a bird.jpg that would be released in the future, I'd love to see it.

Kilmers Elbow posted:

mormonpartyboat posted:

just low and slow. 225 is OK for most anything, and you want it at that temp and smoking before you throw the meat on. "time" isn't really important (since the fire will never stay at a constant heat), so what really matters is internal temperature - you want baby backs at like 160 internal. should take about 5-6 hours. lower and slower go hand in hand, so if you really want to smoke baby backs for 10 hours you can do it, just not at 225. once you get the hang of it, there's all kinds of neat tricks to play with like foil and brining and sear finishing and poo poo like that but the basics are key

there's a million bullshit One Weird Tricks out there but the only really important bits are getting good thermometers so you know what's going on and paper toweling the meat dry before seasoning it.

if you dont feel like eyeballing a thermostat for hours and have spaceship money to burn, you can get something like a traeger pellet smoker and let it take care of the annoying part

Jst0rm posted:

fatman and croberts are the patsys. Sandi is probably loving some mafia man and they will pull out leaving the croberts and lesnik to deal with the angry nerd mob.

Atheist Sunglasses posted:

Starkk posted:

Do you know when they are going to start selling access again?

AP posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8wszD0QxJM


seems depressed to me.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

He ended up having to sell a lot of his own stuff, including memoriabilia, to cover expenses he took on himself. He was dumb and kinda bad, but he was honest.

edit: Wait, they're doing casting for a movie in the CIG offices?

Kakarot posted:

whats the difference between REC and UEC currency on the website?

LastCaress posted:

The FM problems are indicative of a problem that I have been critical of CIG for some time now. CIG (CR) have lots of ideas, the problem is that they are just independent ideas and are not merged together to create a cohesive whole. Many of these ideas run counter to each other, "realistic" physics but "rule of cool" ships, "realistic" physics but physics will be different for each ship( same size engine is different across the ships), delayed ship replacement but short TTK, limited game resources but selling power for real money, just to name a few. But lets look at the FM.

So the reason you use control systems is because you have to, no one wants to use control systems but that is how it works in the real world (its a lot easier to fake it). A PID controller (when compared to a PI controller) is faster, and more precise, but it is much more finicky and requires a lot more upfront work to get stable in a system. While a PI controller is easier to implement and has more tolerance and requires less upfront work. The early AC showed classic signs of being underdeveloped and ultimately underdamped. This got "better" when CIG started putting other controls on top of their original system in order to compensate for the fact they could not get the PID control to be critically damped. This is why the ship are impossible to handle using fixed weapons, and why the thruster values are so high, they are trying to compensate for problems in their PID control system.

So CIG want to have a Control system for each ship, that means each ship will have a different control system with different weighted values, nvm the thruster placements. This means each ship will have to be set up individually just for the stock fitting, then you have to change that control system each time you change the thrusters and other equipment, its a nightmare. The new system is going to make the system easier to set up but it will still require a ton of unneeded work.

So why implement a PID? There is no good reason, it does not make any since when you are talking about the number of ships CIG are creating and the number of changing variables, and because it does not add anything. One excuse that I have seen as to why have a control system is so that when you lose a thruster you will feel its effect. The problem with this is that a Control system is designed to not do that, the most you will feel is that everything will be sluggish, you will have no idea what happened or what you lost, just that you lost power. For a space craft, every action has to be met with an equal and opposite action in order to hold steady. So lets say you apply thrust to pitch up, you have to apply the same amount of thrust down to stop. So lets say you lose a thruster, the action will be the same, its just that now the control system will force more power to be applied in order to achieve the same steady state. Lets say that to make a specific pitch up at the desired rate it takes 10N of force from each nozzle (4 total, with each nozzle capping out at 20N for a max deflection), and the same then for stopping that action. If you lose a nozzle then all that will happen will be that each of the remanding three will apply more thrust, up to the max point. The pilot will not even tell anything has happened, because the controller (if working correctly) will change everything behind the scene so that the operators actions have the same effect, the only effect will be that the max pitch rate will be lower due to the now lower max thrust available.

The idea that you have to fight the controls is also a work of fantasy, because that is not now a control system works. Lets say that the ship is listing to the right and so you have to correct this problem with the stick, well in the real world that would not happen because the control system is able to input the exact same amount as you the operator is doing and the control system will do it faster and instantly. The control system will just compensate for that action and you will continue to fly straight with the stick centered. The idea that you could turn faster in one direction then another also makes no since, as the force applied to stop the faster spin has to be available in the opposite direction to stop the spin. Now if you want to set up a scenario were you can spin faster one direction but it takes longer to slow down, ok but then its the player that is now the control system (again because SC has fixed rates, and speed caps), and is no different then ED's AF system (using this you are the control system).

What CIG are implementing runs counter to what they appear to want flight to be like.

Plankalkuel posted:

Nice post. As someone who has his background in Control Systems, their approach is indeed very counter productive. In theory, you probably could actually automate controller design for the ship thrusters in the design pipeline. I bet you, they haven't done that and are, in fact, adjusting their P, I and D values by hand (NEVER DO THIS!). The whole thing strikes me as something that's indeed easy to fake. In my experience, physics simulations and control systems can interact catastrophically (e.g. if the controller is "faster" than the simulation). In the same vain, change the controlled system (e.g. loose an assortment of thrusters) and your formerly stable controller may become unstable, leading to the ship spazzing out. I imagine both these issues to be very similar to general game physics issues, so debugging might get interesting. So why not fake it and get rid of potential headaches.

Plankalkuel posted:

Nice to meet another Control Systems guy

Actually, if you want to control a simulated system (which the spaceship in SC is), you do not have to run anything on a real-time system. The simulation and the controller just have to be in lock-step, such that the controller code is executed once every XXms of simulation time. This, of course, necessitates that
1. the simulation can be run fast enough to run in "real-time" from the player's perspective (e.g. for 100ms simulation time, the computer has to do 50ms worth of calculations in real time) and
2. if the controller is configured to run every XXms of simulation time, there has to be data from the simulation at those intervals.

What you are writing sounds as if, in a low-fps situation, the simulation time step length increases and so does the controller's step length. While there are ways to design a controller for varying time-step length, this is by no means trivial to do properly! There are ways to get around these issues but seem easy to me. As such it is an rear end-backwards approach to a problem, an arcade/WWII-Dogfight-in-Space game shouldn't even have!

EDIT @LastCaress: Nice copy-pasting action there

squirrelzipper posted:

You finish a book every 44 hours?

Amun Khonsu posted:

wtf is this?



https://www.facebook.com/215475438505750/photos/a.429027047150587.107566.215475438505750/941320922587861/?type=3&theater

ether posted:

I am the suicide-prefention bars on the windows.

G0RF posted:

G0RF posted:

But Sandi said they're expecting 200,000 - 500,000 new backers in six months?

"YOU GOTTA BELIEVE!"

Xaerael posted:

the "Citizen" counter's not even backers. It's just people who've made an account. That's why it spikes hard during "free flight" promos.

Sappo569 posted:

Speaking of making up numbers:



3 days below 20k, and 'surprise' a sudden influx ...

Hopper posted:

Well it is kinda optional, shave or none of that sweet mocapped lovin' chubby.

AP posted:

Doesn't matter if it had to be done or not, a lot of stupid stuff was said at the time by Frontier that people weren't entitled to refunds, they were and so eventually they got them if they stuck with it. The benefits of having offline mode can be argued and the disadvantages of having it impact other features too but that's not the reason I mentioned it.

I understand if you like elite and think it's great, if they are keeping their promises for everything else I think Frontier deserve to be applauded, but they hosed up the PR during the offline feature cut and nobody can successfully argue they didn't. If they'd offered refunds immediately they'd probably have come out ahead in PR due to the positive reaction and had fewer refunds. You can trust someone who fucks up more than someone lying to you about your rights.

And to come back to CIG, still talking about "donations" and no rights to a refund.

AP posted:

Frontier lied about refunds during this disaster, CIG is continuing to lie about refunds.

Frontier I assume isn't actively lying anymore and has a game, CIG don't have any sort of actual game and still are lying.

I dunno, I'm going to stick with a belief that someone you've given money to, choosing to lie to you isn't generally a good sign. gently caress ups happen, PR and otherwise, the constant attempts to defend it are a bit bizarre though.

Berious posted:

Bro that some Shitizen level fanboying. If you promise a major feature for release then say "Well you were playing without this feature that doesn't exist yet - NO REFUNDS" probably wouldn't fly in any country with proper consumer protection laws. They hosed up pure and simple. They've probably made up for it at this point but it was a massive own goal that they deserved the bad press for.

AP posted:

Frontier were refusing refunds to people who had less than 3 hours logged in the "game", who had to log on to try the offline mode tutorial or whatever it was.

Frontier were not in the right due to the fact that in every case they backed down and refunded before being taken to court. I'm sorry that you are wrong, very wrong and appear to be outraged at the idea of people getting a refund after playing too much, something which I personally hadn't mentioned or give a poo poo about. Either people are entitled to a refund for a broken contract promise under the law, even if they'd spent hours in an alpha or they've not. There's no magic, "you must have had fun because you played too long" line in consumer law. As in Star Citizen case from June 2014 anyone in the UK and wider EU can get a refund without having to provide a reason up to release +14 days.

We can continue talking about this if you like as personally I'm sure that the continued argument about it is something Frontier would rather forget and you elite guys still being bitter about it is funny.

AP posted:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-11-20-frontier-outlines-elite-dangerous-refund-policy-following-no-offline-mode-backlash


eligible "having the right to do or obtain something; satisfying the appropriate conditions."


Frontier lied about peoples rights to a refund and backed down when called on it.

This is actually on topic since it's the Star Citizen thread.

AP posted:

Hey, sorry you're still mad about people getting a refund mate.

AP posted:

What poo poo am I making up? I've linked the quote when they did it and I'd link the EU directive but let's face it you aren't going to read it. Refunds are important especially here, I've linked the law before. I don't see the logic in getting annoyed about people exercising their rights or even trying to deceive people that they don't have any. Why even try to do this, do you think you're helping Frontier, do you dislike the fact that persumably a small number of people did play elite for dozens/hundreds of hours and then get a refund?

Hav posted:

Those funny curly things after the statements are 'question marks'. They're interrogative and indicate a desire to have an answer supplied. It's a debate technique.

'Projecting' would tend to involve something to project upon, so a strawman or other construct.

You could answer the questions, but you don't. Why is that?

The EU in general has something known as a 'cooling off' period which is two weeks. It allows anyone who signed a contract the ability to walk away from said contract to remove the concept of coercion. That's really clear law.

Most member states have statutory rights of 1-2 years where the goods or service should perform. if the goods or service fail within this time period, you have the right to a repair or replacement. if the repair is made more than once and satisfaction isn't achieved, a refund may be given.

FD offered refunds when they said that they couldn't fulfill the offline mode, and people started to ask for them. I'm of the opinion that they attempted to do right by people, mostly because it's backed by EU law that _has been_ ratified by the member states, so I tend to treat complaints about FD 'pulling an SC' to be hyperbole.

The Saddest Robot posted:

No separate rapist profession?

What if I just want to rape someone without kidnapping or enslaving them?

AP posted:

That's no game, it's a debt star.

The post you quoted is about consumer rights, it's dry, it's boring and I've posted it a few times. Some probably otherwise bright people see game development companies as football teams. Logic goes out the window entirely and if you mention how company A hosed up one time in a conversation about company B, you get fan idiots of company A mad at you as if you'd besmirched their gaming e-honour.

It's really stupid and, it happens way too often. The particular guy I was talking to is really annoyed about people getting refunds for elite dangerous a full year ago, to such an extent that he was arguing with people on the elite dangerous forums that they weren't entitled to one. Fast forward a year and in October 2015 he's now happy to ask for a refund for Star Citizen for himself but still upset people refunded for elite dangerous. Doesn't make sense to me but then people are odd.

TheLastRoboKy posted:

Maybe with your background in control systems you could work on some self control.

AP posted: