ManofManyAliases posted:

No. From what was told to me, evocati were testing different builds. In a day, they send out multiple builds. Some are more focused on flight dynamics while others on FPS gameplay. The evocati have their own chat, discord, ptu forums, etc. They're all in one test group, but testing different things. The results are tabulated and they'll use those to streamline the builds so that the can get it out to PTU quicker.

Daztek posted:

TheAgent posted:

because gently caress why not

quote this post with your five best predictions of tomorrows live stream, whoever is most accurate wins wither a copy of elite dangerous or planet coaster or a steam game of equivalent or a donation to some loving charity because its christmas you stupid game addicted nerds

1. vignettes are finally shown for SQ42
2. star marine trailer with boot camp guy video, kinda corny
3. 2.6! amazing stuff that was shown last month
4. ptu announcement for 2.6
5. new features that are coming in 3.0, small demo

Dark Off posted:

1. Sq42 trailer or and live reenactment (people did pretend to play 2.6 in the baby PU mode) .
2. 2.6 hits some unfortunate blockers and is postponed to next year.
3. chris roberts doesnt play star marine.
4. mocap behind the scene
5. lots of words. And some kind of race between austin and LA EU team.
The race also decides which studio will close down first. (still left to see EU won, so they should be safe from downsizing now)
6. camera screw up's or and stream delay's

XK posted:

Somehow broke something so badly that you need to VPN to finish. Recommends using a free VPN. Great plan for a broken patcher that uses 30+ GB at a time. 30+ GB over a free VPN sounds like an endless nightmare occurring at mid 1990's modem speeds.

quote:

Thanks for getting in touch. As you’ve (correctly) surmised, any suggestions that the engine switch would have a major impact on our development couldn’t be further from reality. Lumberyard is completely based on Cryengine, yet with a lot of improvements. As a consequence, we do not have to change the fundamental core engine at all which is why this change has had absolutely no effect on our development of Star Citizen.

The advantage of Lumberyard is that we get great ongoing support on the cloud / networking side from Amazon as well as great tools support while continuing uninterrupted development on what we have built up over the last 4 years. As we’ve tried to explain many times before, we have pretty much rewritten 50% of what we licensed 4 years ago now, even in core systems from Cryengine. What is great is that everything we have reworked, also now seamlessly integrates into Lumberyard, and the engine switch has not required any extra engineering time. We are actually very lucky that this opportunity presented itself to work with a powerful and committed company like Amazon that is investing heavily in its tech. This collaboration will effectively allow us to do more for our community going forward without costing us really anything in terms of engineering time or otherwise, so it is a win-win situation and good news all around.

quote:

As you’ve (correctly) surmised, any suggestions that the engine switch would have a major impact on our development couldn’t be further from reality. Lumberyard is completely based on Cryengine, yet with a lot of improvements. As a consequence, we do not have to change the fundamental core engine at all which is why this change has had absolutely no effect on our development of Star Citizen.


As we’ve tried to explain many times before, we have pretty much rewritten 50% of what we licensed 4 years ago now, even in core systems from Cryengine. What is great is that everything we have reworked, also now seamlessly integrates into Lumberyard, and the engine switch has not required any extra engineering time.

will effectively allow us to do more for our community going forward without costing us really anything in terms of engineering time or otherwise,

Mr Fronts posted:

Please, allow me.

Kosumo posted:

You are Christ Roberts; What would you do?

You are driving down Pacific coast highway in your limited edition Porsche when you round a corner to find a truck that was moving old tires as roll over and the tires have all caught on fire.

Do you -

Kosumo posted:

You are Derek Smart; What would you do?

You are driving down I95 highway in your Tesla when you round a corner to find a truck that was moving old tires as roll over and the tires have all caught on fire.

Do you -

Kosumo posted:

You are Goons; What would you do?

You are driving down the information highway in your shopping trolly when you round a corner to find a truck that was moving old tires as roll over and the tires have all caught on fire.

Do you -

TheAgent posted:

quote:

What I sent you is what [name] considers the barest of bones release of 3.0. Currently, in order to hit [name]'s release to coincide ship sales, this is what we have to put out. I am beyond hopeful more progress will be made before we release this to backers. Planetary landings are posing extremely problematic at the moment, as well as AI. We were left last year with almost zero progress on AI thanks to [contracted company] but have since moved all work in-house. Most contracted studios are now gone replaced by in-house people.

I want to mention the negativity about the project. I don't know if you'll post this. I want to say many of us here believe in what we are doing. We are not relaxing in hot tubs surrounded by bikini-clad girls, smoking fat-cat cigars lit with backer money. We work very, very hard. Sixty hours a week sometimes. We try to breathe life into this game. We are not a faceless zombie army of programmers and artists. We are people. I want everyone to remember that.

We do understand the patience of people is wearing thing. Mistakes, sometimes big mistakes, have been made. I am not privy to every piece of information regarding those. We know they've happened. We don't stop working. We don't stop trying. We guide and mentor and continue to strive to make the best of bad situations.

We are years out from a full release. Please try to understand that doesn't mean never. Backers started this journey with us and I hope they finish it with us.

quote:

2014: original release date missed, and original kickstarter product undelivered, thats fine delays happen

2015: 2.0 turns out to be quite smaller than expected and sq42 aint nowhere to be seen, That is fine much larger 3.0 will fix everything

2016: 3.0 is completely missing and 2.0 is only getting maintenance mode updates, and star marine turns out to be quite generic fps (missing all the cool stuff they showcased in earlier demos)

2017: 3.0 will be out late this year same with sq42.(not likely to happen on both of these events, maybe theres somekind of mvp that doesnt resemble anything they promised)
3.1?
mining
refineries
quantum interdictions
refueling

2018:
3.2
salvage
repair
3.3
farming
rescue
4.0.
exploration
science

Road mapped contend ends.

2019:5.0
cockpit decorations
melee combat
heavy weapons
tablet companion app

bengal carrier in PU

2020: 6.0
Command and Control Center – Supervise the battle from the deck of your Idris or Destroyer (class TBA) with advanced C&C packages that allow you to tie all of your ships together and assume central command from the 3rd seat.

Space Station management

2021: 7.0
Public Transportation System

Enhanced Capital Ship Systems – In addition to the command and control systems we’ve already outlined, we’re going to expand capital ship functions! Lead a damage control team to fight fires and repair key systems during battle, control internal bulkheads to slow boarders and man a number of consoles, like navigation and engineering, that will make commanding a capital ship feel even more immersive.

Stellar Cartography

Alien Languages – Do you speak Banu? We will work with real-world linguists to create distinctive and realistic alien languages for Star Citizen’s three biggest alien races, the Vanduul, the Xi’An and the Banu. No universal translators, no garbled animal noises: Star Citizen’s aliens will be speaking their own authentic languages!

2022:8.0
INDEPENDENT ARBITRATOR’S GUILD – Have you been wronged by your superiors? Has the member of your organization entrusted with watching the funds, been watching them go into their own pocket? Think you don’t have any recourse? You’re wrong. Fully licensed and bonded to work within the UEE and beyond, the Independent Arbitrator’s Guild allows citizens (and civilians, we don’t discriminate!) to file complaints against (or within) private organizations. Petition cases with our IAG representatives to have your voice heard and restitutions made. Is your business less than legitimate? IAG is only here to judge the matters you want us to. Confidentiality is guaranteed.

Enhanced Ship Modularity

pets

VR

2023:9.0
modding support and private servers

2024:10.0 work begins on implementing stuff chris has promised in 10 for the chairman
Gravity Generators
Hull Breaches
Inertia on objects not anchored on ships
Wreckage as a navigational hazard
Using inertia for flight rather than burning fuel all the time
Dangerous and Dynamic Jump Points
Changeable gravity systems for ships
Booby traps and trackers for cargo
Detailed navigation system

2025:11,0
Ship repair and cleanliness/degradation
Organization Infiltration
Playing as another alien race
In depth non-FTL communication
Character damage and aging
Character histories and/or ancestral trees
Dynamic population count

2026: 12.0
In-fiction “Live Team” that will report player driven events as in-fiction news
Large scale dynamic events
Player Rating System
Organization reputation system
Damageable cyborg limbs and cybernetic repair facilities
Dynamic social interaction with NPCs

2027: 13.0
Galactapedia
Space creatures
Cargo damage (item damage)
Docking and Undocking Tech
Realistic Audio Options
Personally Owned NPCs

2028: 14.0
Getting Everyone into the Same Instance
Character Customization
Ship connected to User Online/Offline Status
Stealth Game Play
Rigging
Anchoring to an Asteroid

2029: 15.0
Non-Lethal Combat Modules
Raid Supply Shipments
Owning an Alien Ship
Catapulting Through Space
Jury Rig Repairing
Escape Pods

2030:16.0
Start up Sequence for Large Multi-Crew Ships
Remotely Hacking Ships
Pacing NPC's
Game Generated Missions
Communication Between Two Ships
Controlled and Uncontrolled Space
NPC Crews
Guild Wars
Travelling in Fleets

2031:17.0
Trading weapons in the FPS
UI Customization
Assigning Ships to Landing Zones
Clothing Damage
Character Creator
Interior Damage System
Roaming Floating Structures
Electronic Warfare in the PU
NPC population in the PU

2032:18.0
Ship Aging
Linux Client
In game Banking
FPS environmental hazards
Physical grappling beam
Ship spoofing
Organic ships
Search players for weapons
Starting wars between the different races
Tractor Beams

2033:19.0
NPCs react to weapons
Drop pods
Limb Damage
Org recruiting NPCs
NPC & Human scanning

quote:

2014: original release date missed, and original kickstarter product undelivered, thats fine delays happen

2015: 2.0 turns out to be quite smaller than expected and sq42 aint nowhere to be seen, That is fine much larger 3.0 will fix everything

2016: 3.0 is completely missing and 2.0 is only getting maintenance mode updates, and star marine turns out to be quite generic fps (missing all the cool stuff they showcased in earlier demos)

2017: 3.0 will be out late this year same with sq42.(not likely to happen on both of these events, maybe theres somekind of mvp that doesnt resemble anything they promised)

2018: 4.0 features additional system to visit

2019:5.0 features 10 different star systems

2020: 6.0 features 40 different star systems

2021: 7.0 features 40 different star systems, work on porting the previous created contend into new engine begins

2022:8.0 features 40 different star systems work on porting the contend finishes.

2023:9.0 developers start to go insane with the amount of code nobody understands.

Xaerael posted:

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

quote:

from http://gameranx.com/updates/id/70033/article/the-chris-roberts-theory-of-everything/
Between November 2005 and March 2008, Ascendant Pictures and Kevin Costner were in a legal battle. The subject of litigation was the claim that the Film company promised Costner that he would be able to star in a film called Taming Ben Taylor, about a bitter and divorced man who refused to sell his winery to the neighboring golf course. They promised him in December 2004 that the $8 million deal would go through regardless of production financing, but by June 2005 he was told that the movie wouldn’t be going forward after all. The court papers state that Costner was misled about Ascendant Pictures ability to make the film, being strung along for several months of delays. In that interim he had to pass up on several other job offers. Ascendant Pictures later filed a cross-complaint that the Creative Artist Agency that represented Costner was the one responsible for misrepresenting the situation, and that they turned away actresses and directors that could’ve been involved, ending up hurting the financing prospects of the project.

quote:

When Chris Roberts and I founded Cloud Imperium Games to launch the effort, we were not only drawing on Chris' legendary abilities and track record as a game designer in this field, but also on a combined experience of three decades in independent film financing and production.

quote:

Rather than opting for the Kickstarter site, we created our own platform to establish a frictionless, direct relationship with the interested community. This allowed us also to fine tune our Terms of Use for a favorable legal and tax treatment.

quote:

We learned a lesson when our initial platform was not stable enough and collapsed intermittently during the campaign. Due to our limited funds, we had commissioned the site design to a small developer. (Kickstarter graciously allowed us to create a parallel campaign on its platform to receive funds during our site outages. We since used the campaign funds to partner with a Canadian platform developer, and together we have built a very stable and advanced platform which now is not only serving our site, but is currently readied for other developers who are interested in following our path.)

quote:

Any unforeseen changes in the development process would be reviewed and approved by experienced specialists who monitor that process - something very familiar in the film production process as well. The completion guarantor would assure that the project will either be delivered to the early buyers as promised, or return the funds. Based on the fees charged in the film business, the insurance premium for such a completion guarantee and associated monitoring would probably be around 5 to 7 percent of the development budget.)

XK posted:

All that poo poo is a bit too dense, somebody is going to have to work on making all that investment and tax storyline more digestible. I'm even having a little trouble wrapping my head around what it's trying to say, and the proposed end motivation.

I'm a smart guy, and I've read that poo poo 3 or 4 times, and I only kind of get it, I think.

XK posted:

This is pretty much what I eventually derived from that, but somebody who really understands what occurred needs to make it into a more straight forward narrative.

Right now, that reads like, "I went into the woods, took a rock, bashed an animal in the head, cut its body into pieces, heated those pieces to 160F, mashed them up in my mouth, and placed them into my stomach." To the general audience, that's impenetrable. The individual operations are easily understood, but the overall context of what's happening is difficult to grasp.

"I was hungry, I killed an animal, cooked it, then ate it." The motivation and what's being achieved is clear.

I'm not clear if the proposed events were a tax avoidance scheme with the investors in on it, or it was an attempt to defraud investors, or both, or a scheme to steal bank loans, or a ponzi like Madoff, or they're leveraging funds legitimately but being kind of shady with them afterward. It needs a TLDR on the motivation and goal.

quote:

But the funds' returns have fallen far short of their initial forecasts. VIP 3, for example, initially promised a return of some $37 million by 2004, but by the end of last year had made only $645,000.

TrustmeImLegit posted:

They aren't allegations. Several of the top people went to jail for fraud. Chris got away. There was no way as one of the top 3 exec producers for these movies that he didn't know they only had 20% of the budget they should have.

quote:

here is one thing: the money flow... from the vip to the rising star (full amount), rs to ascendant pictures (or other inhouse) 20 %, rest over some other points (for the german tax auhorities) straight to a bank, getting fixed deposit for 10 years. This included an intercompany loan for the safe bed amount, since cr could / would not be able to pay it.
according to some investors, all 3 money movements took place in the same time, so its clear that this was a fixed deal.
cr knows what he does

AP posted:

I'm now going to list the things Chris Roberts has told the truth about :-

Wiz posted:

Nah, it makes perfect sense. No human being can possibly finish Star Citizen with all the promised features, but what about a perfect immortal machine? Full AI control of the pipelines is clearly the way forward.

Dark Off posted:

They replaced all the coder's with AI.
It all makes sense now

Think about obsidians Radiant AI, that is in charge of coding

Booourns posted:

From an outside view, the way you guys invoke FYAD as a boogeyman is exactly the same as the way SC people do it with derek smart

quote:

"Chris in a well" is an adaptation of the "Goon in a well" apologue well known in GBS and E/N to describe goons posting about their problem who refuse to take good advice. In the adaptation, goons offer advice in futility to executive producer Chris Roberts.

Chris: "Help! HELP! Star Citizen is going nowhere!"
Goons1-4: "Stop making promises! Fire the ship artists and hire some gameplay developers!"
Chris: "I'm thinking I should make more promises... should I sell a new concept ship too?"
Goon5: "NO! I have worked on big games before, scope creep is a real thing that should be avoided."
Goons6-8: "We're refunding our space chariots! Stop selling dreams and make the game!"
dsmart: "I've written an entire blog post about refunds!"
Chris: "I can see your refunds and blog post, but I don't want to acknowledge problems... should I sell a new concept?"
Goon10: "No! If you keep selling dreams, you'll be upside-down on progress, and then you'll be proper hosed."
Chris: "I started a new video series and CIG hasn't gone bankrupt yet. I'm gonna record more mo-cap..."
Goons11-18: "No! Stop selling jpegs! Focus on making the game!"
Chris: "Guys, Star Citizen is seriously not ready for Citcon! Help! HELP!"
Goon19: "I was stuck in development hell once. It took me two years, but I managed to build a working game by switching engines to something better suited to the gameplay we wanted. I'm e-mailing you the github link, design documents, and an assortment of engine pro/con charts."
Goon20: "I've engineered a funding tracker that shows your current trajectory. If you keep selling concept ships, you'll earn less and less, while alienating even more of your customers!"
Chris: "Thanks for your help, guys. I'm gonna keep selling dreams and jpegs. I'll do one more mo-cap session and just show that at Citcon."
Goons1-20 piss on Star Citizen
Goon21: "Guys, seriously... call your parents."
MoMA: "Yeah, like any of you guys have even have parents, you neckbearded, EVE-addicted shut-ins."

Natron posted:

If I were Ben I'd be all about Wing Commander, too.

Imagine meeting your hero and then working for him, only to find out that he's a scammer and a hack. You'd long to relive the nostalgic days when you only knew him by the media he created and the image you made of him in your head.

Chin posted:

I can't believe Ben doxxed his own paparazzi brother.

SelenicMartian posted:

Chris is giving his best face



And how nice of them to hire the ghost of H.R. Giger for an interior decorator.

Also, The space cat is named Sally.

What does Ben have to say about "Sally"?

"Yes, eat all the semen sally, lick the head of my cock smooth and clean, so I can slip it back into you, pushing it deep in your soft mouth. #16449"

Quavers posted:

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/855208118413864961/photo/1

quote:

I've never watched any of their Bugsmashers videos. I made the mistake of wasting that 9 minutes of my life today and feel grief. Here's my notes:

Empty chairs all around him, maybe because he's starting work before 9 AM, wonder if that's against any california regulations.
10k lines of code in a single file? WHAT.
Lazy resets of object states - this is a hilariously bad practice that will cause no end of subtle bugs, was probably done as a lazy way to maintain thread safety instead of learning what a lock statement is
Passing state objects around by reference, but it's not clear who owns the original copy of that reference or when it can be updated or changed. It seems that they get them in different ways if they're vehicles or ships. This is unclear and will lead to subtle bugs down the line.
#ifdefs littered throughout for debugging - yet they're not enabled while he's debugging, which tells me that they're for testing 'experimental' code, which should never, ever be left in a production branch or you're going to end up with mountains of them that no one is really sure what does or what they break or depend upon to function.
getphysicsstatus, getphysicsstatusmain? WTF is the difference between these two objects, I'm going to assume that he's trialing replacing the system with something new, but why is it in this branch of code if he's not specifically testing replacing that system - this reeks of the same type of 'I don't really know wtf I'm doing, so I'm just throwing code at the wall until something sticks'.
'you have mixed tabs and spaces' warning files is just because that should be standardized and automatically enforced by whatever source control system they have in place.
animMode flag for... doing what? he never specifies why it would be there in the first place or why the track system would need it disabled, nor why it would substantially change what an object's function is, which is already a poor design choice that is now compounded by lack of clarity.
Also, because the true variable is reading as (4) instead of (1) in the debugger, it's almost certainly going to be an uninitialized variable, which is like the most basic C++ 101 programming error you could ever possibly make.
IT IS LOLOLOL
45fps in a basic test scene with lighting disabled on a dev machine, hopefully they have a TON of debug flags enabled that is causing that (spoiler: it shouldn't happen even with a debugger attached unless it's hosed).

The bug in the first place was either incredibly forced and contrived, or CIG really do have programmers that couldn't finish an intro to C++ class.

quote:

- Horrific spaghetticode in their destructor. Why is there different functionality based on whether or not a "pLocalPlayerInteractionPlugin" flag is set? Why is that logic not included in the LeaveAllPlayerPlugins function? Why are these plugins not responsible for cleaning themselves up? Why is HUD being informed of these events from here?!?
- He calls the function "ExitInit" but it's clearly spelled as "ExitInt". This implies the exact opposite function that he's referring to. It takes all of two seconds to right click -> rename identifier in VS. And save the next poor soul who inherits that godforsaken codebase two hours as he struggles to figure that out.
- The 'check that the player can exit the vehicle from somewhere' is a horrible mess of spaghetti dependencies.
- There is no rhyme or reason for how values are tested. Why do some use an IsEquivalent(ZERO) while others are not.
- Why is a Matrix34w struct being used in this block of code. If there are multiple formats of matricies being used, how does one know what each function returns and what each function expects? If all matrix types are assumed to be the same, why is it not abstracted out to a single, impossible-to-mistype Matrix struct? If not, why is there no built-in function documentation clearly defining what is expected? And does each function religiously check that the types are what are needed (spoiler: the codeblock in that section already failed this). In which case, we now have a pretty good idea why T-posing commandos are so commonplace.
- Why are there thread exiting while the debugger is stopped? What are they doing in the background that necessitates spinning up and killing threads while the game is running? Why are they not pooled?!?
- Why is there anything at all relating to missiles in seat class?!
- Lua errors popping up. They're using Lua for parts of the game. I would love so dearly to see how they're integrating that and what parts of their logic they've moved to script.
- "Execute Exit will run an animation and then eventually execute Execute Exit" have I stepped into an alternate reality where Dr. Seuss writes code designed for torturing programmers? There is literally nothing about this that is not wrong.
- I'm almost getting epilepsy from the warnings and errors whizzing by. What is the purpose of enabling a warning system if you're going to ignore their output? I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume he was working from a branch that someone was in the process of overhauling that system in. I can't stomach the alternative.
- Again with the thousands and thousands of lines of code per file. No wonder he can only get around them by ctrl+f.
- His 'fix' involves adding yet more vague and unclear spaghetti code to the mess. Even with his description of what the code does, I would still need to look through all of the surrounding code and what is called to even begin to unravel what exactly it's trying to accomplish. The variations of "Exit" actively work against informing the reader what "Exit" means. Well written code can be understood just by reading it - this is not well written code.
- He describes why the server should be authoritative over these events. This is true and good. Except he had just described earlier how players are responsible for other state changes, which does not follow the design he just mentioned.
- "It won't reset his entity id when he leaves the seat". Why would an entity ID ever change, especially just when they change from sitting to standing? This is just agonizingly wrong. The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that they're sharing player data with ship data based on whether or not the player is sitting - so when the player is sitting, he 'becomes' the ship. It pains my soul to even contemplate the amount of subtle bugs that will allow. And it could be solved so much more cleanly and simply if it had been designed properly from the beginning.
- m_isEntering. Why is player state controlled by a set of multiple flags instead of a proper state machine? This is My First 2D Platformer Tutorial levels of terrible.
- "Failed to init PositionAdjust due to missing pa[ramater?]" sounds like yet another wonderful byproduct of spaghetti.
- "I just realized that that true enables transitions and we don't want transitions" - Because you're writing horrible kludges to duct tape spaghetti together.

TrustmeImLegit posted:

Hey Goon Programmer guy who got super mad at bugsmashers and wrote a bunch of bullet points.

CIG is callin you out


https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/6au9ai/showed_a_programmer_friend_of_mine_a_couple/


He admits they rush and 'hack' in code. Completely demolishing all the rude reddit citizens in that thread.

Also maybe there is a SECRET DEV BUILD?!??!?!?

The Glumslinger posted:

Like, this is something that does happen in the game industry a lot (though thankfully not at my studio, mainly because we don't do demos at industry events until our game is basically shipped), but its also one of the thing everyone in the industry hates the most. You crunch like hell for E3 or gamescom, and try to preimplement a ton of features, and then afterwards you need to go back and rewrite them. Like, do people remember Sonic 06? Apparently for some trade show, they branched the game and added in a ton of features and cleaned up gameplay that never got back ported into the main branch.

quote:

His response does give me hope that some people there actually care about their work, though, as I'm sure that his hands are tied and he can only do his best with the limitations he's been given. As I've said all along, I have the utmost respect for their developers - it's management that's the problem.

peter gabriel posted:

The best bit about this was I think they made a script that spidered the thread here at the time and it auto reported the Imgur images, but we kept posting their images and they got reported and removed too Citizens getting their own stuff removed from Imgur will always be maybe the funniest thing to have happened out of all this to me

Jobbo_Fett posted:

So how's that "Making Of" documentary coming along? Have CIG mentioned anything about it?

AlmightyPants posted:

I saw a couple things regarding Beyond Good and Evil 2.

https://kotaku.com/what-beyond-good-evil-2-is-now-and-what-its-creators-1796116469 has a clip of really seamless surface to orbit looking stuff.

The second was watching Giant Bomb at Nite tonight and hearing them all trash the gently caress out of it. They said it's a tech demo for an incomplete game that's been delayed forever and compared it unfavorably to No Man's Sky. There was also some stuff about taking a picture of a pig and showing it to another pig and that second pig saying it knows the first pig, which sounds an awful lot like star citizen's supposed AI fantasy.

Here's the thing that differentiates BG&E2 from Star Citizens: no consumer is on the hook for hundreds or thousands of dollars for it. If it flops or never makes it out of development hell or whatever it doesn't hurt a single person outside of the companies involved and their stakeholders. It seems like the kind of game I'd be into if it came out, but if it doesn't then I don't incur any penalty. And should I decide to pre-order it, I will only suffer to the tune of $59.99.

Also, having recently finished one of the paths in NMS and sinking like 70 hours in, it's fun for what it is, I found a space dinosaur yesterday and a couple planets with creatures that looked like cocks and balls combined hopping around on their scrotums, which made me giggle.

quote:

“I’m changing the time,” Ancel said as he then zoomed out so that the camera pulled back from the atmosphere into outer space. Many games have day/night cycles, but in this demo, “Changing the time” meant actually making the planet rotate on its axis as it moved around a star,causing the light from the star to hit the surface differently. “There is a universal simulation,” he said. “There are galaxies. It’s not just changing the color of the sun. Everything is rotating.”

quote:

“When you see a sunset in Beyond Good and Evil 2, that’s a real sunset,” producer Guillaume Brunier added. “It’s not just some lights our artists put there.”

quote:

Ancel zoomed back in. He could go from a surface-level view and back out into space in no time, with no loading screens.

quote:

Brunier described encounters with the makers of other gaming tech that wasn’t equipped to do coffeehouse-to-cosmos zooming. “When we work with other guys on other engines and we say we need to travel 20,000 kilometers per hour on the planet, they say, ‘What are you talking about?’ When we say, ‘We need to display special effects at 200km away from the player, they don’t… they are not doing these kinds of things usually.’

quote:

Exploration will span the galaxy, as the developers want players to zip across planets from city to city and fly from planet to planet. All of the content can’t be hand-made, so Ancel explained that the developers will, to an extent, use random generation. They will hand-make some content and let the computer do some of the other. Many of you reading are probably having No Man’s Sky flashbacks right now, but Ancel actually referenced Dwarf Fortress as an inspiration. The beloved, hardcore PC game generates new societies with their own mythology and history. “We have some techniques that allows us to populate the planet in a logical way,” Ancel said.

Chev posted:

Ancel's hand crafted procedural gen tech is actually something they've been playing with for a long time, it was used in a 2d capacity in Rayman Origins already and they showed a 3d version of it in a french event last year. It's really a level design tool, basically the level designed draws the broad shapes and the software fills it with assets and greebles. It's whole purpose is fast iteration and removing bottleneck, the exact inverse of what Roberts is doing.

http://www.vg247.com/2017/06/15/beyond-good-and-evil-2-is-an-ambitious-concept-tempered-by-a-nine-year-shitshow/ posted:

“Cities can grow by themselves, they can be destroyed, they can connect to others. Everything is alive, in fact, it’s not pre-scripted.”

Chev posted:

The photo stuff is easy, BGE1 had a simple version of it, and look no further than the recent Zelda: Breath of the Wild to get how it works. Basically, when you take a photo, on one side you make a jpeg for the player and on the other you just tag the object or objects in the view. If it were a real life photo you'd have all kinds of shape recognition problems to solve but for a game it's easy since it's a simple volume test. That way it becomes trivial to have the game acknowledge the tagged object.

The growing city is a bit trickier but we can go to Introversion's famous 2007 Subversion demo. We know Ubisoft has that kind of tech too because they used it to build Paris in Assassin's Creed Whatchamacallit. The only question is, once you make it dynamic, how well does it play with the streaming system (since in AC it was prebaked) and how do you make it relevant to gameplay. But unlike CIG they're a veteran company with a proven toolchain and a long experience in streaming worlds.

XK posted:

I remember Lando was streaming when the news broke of Ben's site. You could see him get distracted, hurriedly click through a couple links, then just gets this super aggravated look on his face.

It was one of my favorite SC moments.

XK posted:

I totally forgot Derek was going on the Open House stream at 5 EST. I'll listen to it from the start and let you guys know if there's any "Let me loving finish!" or anything in it.

Kelp Me! posted:

Mostly I've just seen the QCS threads where he comes in to drop sick owns defending his campaign of IRL harassment against people only tangentially related to star citizen

star citizen's hilarious endless development cycle is absolutely in no way eerily reminiscent of Battlecruiser 3000's development cycle, by the way.

Kelp Me! posted:

I think the BC3000 thing is really the most baffling to me about the whole deal. It'd be like if John Romero went after the Shadow Warrior 2 devs for making a swordfighting game that was too crude and juvenile.