MinorInconvenience posted:

Okay. I just read through over three thousand stupid posts. No offense to any of the many stupid posters. Obviously, nothing is currently happening (at least as revealed to the public) in regards to CIG's ultimate downfall and likely bankruptcy in the last month.

I'm tired of monitoring this thread. Hopefully Croberts & Co. will do something incredibly stupid so we can all talk about that stupidity instead of Derek's obvious autistic insanity or loving lovely anime or Rick & Morty or whatever....

Until then, if any of the corporate entities file any papers and anyone wants some color on that (from a lawyer's non-lawyer perspective), please shoot me a PM.

Otherwise, I'm loving out. You fuckers be craycray....

Peace out!

posted:

Join me in spending more cash, not because I want to help development any longer, but just to see if we can literally cause a hater to have a brain aneurysm.

Cause that's where I am at now, I'm spending just to hurt the haters.

doingitwrong posted:

The one thing we should have learned by now is that time and Star Citizen makes fools of us all. The SC faithful have been so sure that total success is just around the corner for so long. And the SC skeptics have been so sure that total collapse has been just around the corner for so long. And everyone has been wrong.

Star Citizen continues to defy expectations in all directions. It lumbers along blatantly defying the laws of physics, finances, and project management and it just can't die. But it can't live either. And everyone involved, with each passing month, finds themselves thinking "surely it can't continue". Surely they have to release something. Surely there has to be progress. Surely they'll have to come clean. Surely it can't go on like this. But it goes on.

This is purgatory. We are caught in purgatory--in the limbo between dreams and disaster. The people who have forgotten Star Citizen are the only ones who are free. We who choose to watch this slow collapse are just as trapped as those who hope they are watching a slow assembly. Time has no meaning here for us. We repeat actions and complaints and sick burns and pizza fights endlessly. We will do this for eternity. All of us, together, in these grey stimperial wastes.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

If backers had put as much effort towards keeping CIG and Chris accountable as they do towards mocking Derek the game would have been out years ago. At this stage it doesn't matter. There is no game. There never will be a game. There will only be a continuation of CIG's failures, incompetence, and pathetic mismanagement until the money runs out. The story of Star Citizen is not about how one man managed to scam millions out of eager supporters. It's about how the unbridled enthusiasm of crowdfunding enabled a man to scam himself into believing he could do whatever he wanted. And there is no better conman than one who believes his own con.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

There's no way I could have guessed the year, but I did expect Chris to do whatever it took to maintain the illusion that he wasn't the biggest failure in the history of game development. Before he lies to anyone else he lies to himself. He lies about how he's competent, he lies about how he's successful, he lies about how his magnum opus is going to revolutionize gaming, he lies about everything. His only talent is self-delusion, of being so convinced by his own bullshit that he comes off as genuine to anyone he needs something from. Those who have already served their purpose are immediately disregarded for the next source of income. Original backers got screwed so that new backers could have previously limited features, older ships were abandoned for new concept sales, and now every backer left is screwed so CIG can enjoy a little more time on life support.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

One of the nice things about Star Citizen at this point is that things have pretty much calcified into their existing properties. Nobody here is magically going to be impressed and decide that, indeed, Star Citizen is good and will impress the world. Similarly nobody on the other side is going to see that and magically go "wow, they didn't show any gameplay" and decide to get a refund. People will see what they want to see, especially given how good Chris is at providing just enough rope for people to hang themselves on their own dreams. What I saw was a lot of really impressive work for a game that nobody actually paid for. I see planets that would look fantastic as flyovers during a cutscene, art assets that would be really great in localized encounters, and plenty of generic (but still nice) content. If CIG had maintained the original concept of instances linked by cutscenes, or if it was for a single player Squadron 42, then I'd be pretty impressed. But since the content they revealed has minimal impact on the expected gameplay, they steadfastly failed to show any kind of multiplayer interaction (or any real gameplay to speak of), and since Star Citizen is supposed to be a MMO and not a single player game there isn't much to be excited about.

What I saw was basically yet another indication of the things that actually matter to Chris Roberts; grandeur, scale, and derivative content. Look at how many times he talked about things that sound impressive like all those NPCs, the size of various buildings, provided a reference to a superior work of fiction like Blade Runner or Star Wars. Look at how little he talked about gameplay loops, or introduced mechanics that players have been waiting years for, or addressed core issues like networking, performance, or the flight model. Look at how a game that was meant to be a space simulation barely even touched space; indeed the only relevant discussion regarding actual space travel was how Chris apparently thinks that waiting eight minutes to travel between planets is somehow good game design. Look at how he thinks that showing hundreds of "procedurally generated" city blocks will somehow enhance the player experience, or how having millions of square kilometers of empty territory will lead to a better experience than what you can already get with Elite.

Star Citizen is not a scam, it's an ego trip. It's hundreds of people working on something, and doing what looks to be some good work doing it, to stoke the narcissism of a failed developer who is more interested in maintaining the appearances of producing a AAA title than actually delivering it. What we saw today was absolutely an indication that they are burning millions and using up a lot of personnel, and they are delivering on things. The problem is that what they're delivering has no bearing on what people are paying for.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Their MMO, which has been in development since 2011 (gently caress you Chris and your "full production" bullshit), can't handle the pilot of a multicrew vessel disconnecting from the rest of the party. Their MMO doesn't have AI, and required a full crew of people to fake a mission experience. Their MMO couldn't handle a rover driving on to a ramp without exploding, or feature two large ships fighting without turning into a slide show. Their MMO is so poorly programmed that they had to script a ship exploding when it got shot. Their MMO is poo poo.

Their MMO is being designed by a "visionary" who, given a year to develop a vignette to show off his dream for gameplay, could only come up with a lovely fetch quest. A visionary who is more concerned about marketing VOIP and some lovely webcam over producing any kind of gameplay. A visionary who believes things done a decade ago are somehow novel or interesting. Their MMO is being designed by an idiot.

Their MMO isn't a MMO. It's a case study in poor design practices, the perils of lovely oversight, the gullibility of gamer, and the myth of the "Great Man" game developer. It's a condemnation of Chris Roberts and irrefutable proof that he is a fraud who is better at spending money than designing games.

PederP posted:

But there's a very specific reason for the project being about keeping up appearances while raking in crowdfunding and pre-orders: The product they're claiming to make cannot be made. Even if the funding had been given to the best developers in the world with the best leadership at the helm, it could not be made. If they'd sold a project with a smaller, more feasible, scope, they would not have reached the current level of funding.

I think that's a very important lesson from this whole debacle, and a recurring theme with many crowdfunded projects: They're built on the deception that progress has already been made and they're promising something that cannot be made. This gives them access to the market for this speculative product, and right from the start sets the project up to dissapointment and anger the backers (when the real product inevitably differs from what was promised) - or to simply drag along as a masquerade until a plausible collapse can be fabricated (or an actual one happens).

It is also worth noticing that simulation, procedural content and/or AI are usually cornerstones of these fabricated games. All are easy to fake as in-development, all promise a paradigm-shift in gameplay experience, and present difficult promises to see through for many gamers. They're all noticably absent from the AAA titles with their high production values but shallow technology - thus creating a perfect opportunity to exploit the disillusion which is strong among some gamers.

Star Citizen and its ilk appeals to gamers who are like the Man in Black from West World - addicted to gaming and virtual worlds, but craving a deeper experience than what's being offered. They want a game with moving parts inside the space ships - not just fake polygon ships, they want NPCs who aren't just scripted to tell a story but with actual agency and existence, they want multi-player experiences with consequence and forced realism - fellow players need to be part of the game, not just fellow visitors to the theme park. But the irony is that many of these gamers are flawed and broken individuals, who would probably not capable of functioning in, or even enjoying, an actual virtual world.

This is not the last time we'll see a crowdfunded game promising ground-breaking technology and "real" games. There's a huge demand for these games - a demand strong enough to make many gamers forget how Radiant AI, Black & White, No Man's Sky, Horizons - to name just a few - turned out as parodies what was promised.

Some Star Citizen backers just wanted an iterative improvement on the sci-fi sandbox and/or spaceship-pew-pew genres. But this group alone doesn't have the spending power that the crowdfunding opportunists need - so they turn to the Men in Black. The original crowdfunding pitch for Star Citizen was full of signs that this was the case. Anyone claiming the pitch was ok, and it was the scope creep and mismanagement which have led to the current fiasco, needs to go read the pitch again. The drama and failure was inevitable.

I called this when I read the pitch for the first time. Derek Smart is on record as claiming it could be done. Those who kept clear of backing this outcalled the Warlord. I have no doubt this knowledge haunts him. He was once a backer. He fell for the scam. Out-witted by a Crobear, he thirst for revenge and is forever doomed to tweet his rage into the virtual void. Drawn to such a powerful source of nerd-rage, the virtual Cacodemons, hiding their true names behind monikers such as "Maht Daymun" and "minus 5 IQ Derek", grow ever stronger - tainted heralds of the end times, where the lost souls of gamers languish in unfidelitious console gaming hell. Will the Eudaemonic goons be able to save the day through lols and revealing the sickening truths? I hope so, the doggos and cattes deserve a better internet tomorrow.

G0RF posted:

Here's a crap thing I just made. I don't assume any precision in these, just am throwing them out there to model how I think Chris and Sandi look at things.



I suspect Chris and Sandi (and many others) do find themselves wondering on occasion, "Has Star Citizen peaked yet?" If they aren't asking it, they should be. I know the big publishers are. I know gaming journalists are. I know their critics and competitors are.



The truth is, we don't know. Last year was their best ever. Yet January is down by 20%, and the upcoming split of Squadron 42 and Star Citizen into products which must be purchased separately is an especially risky strategic decision. Profoundly so. CIG is no doubt calculating that splitting them up might make it even easier to keep the organization in "The Dream Zone".

quote:

"Now we'll have revenues coming from two separate games! We might even DOUBLE our monthly revenues going forward!"

Splitting the IP is going to finally give CIG a measure of the market viability of Squadron 42 as a standalone property.

If Chris isn't terrified about the possibilities, I think he should be. That project is his Dream Baby, so near and dear to his director's heart and his gaming legacy. He's thrown everything he's got at it.

-- A buttload of recognizable, expensive Hollywood actors
-- Phonebook-sized bloody scripts
-- Craploads of motion capture for different studios (x4)
-- Tens of millions of dollars
-- Endless hyperbole like "If I was doing a AAA Wing Commander for EA, Squadron 42 is going to be that and then some."
-- His wife

Expectations are sky high thanks to CIG hype and Gaming Mag amplification of it. Yet they have precious little to show for Squadron 42-- conspicuously little-- beyond uncanny valley cornball tripe uttered by A List actors who surely assumed at the time they signed on that being in this game was a great career move. It might end up that they've lent their talents to an absolute mega-turkey that ends up solely redeemed by the embarrassment of riches it provides in animated gifs. (I know we're excited by that possibility- but I doubt Gary Oldman and Co will be.)

--- "PAAAARRP!"

---

What if - after the split - new backers just choose Star Citizen? The project they've heard so much about.

-- The one they can play with lots of friends. (theoretically)
-- The one with VR coming. (theoretically)
-- The one with procedural generation of planets. (theoretically)
-- The one with ship-to-ship combat between dozens of players (theoretically)that allows one party to storm the other and engage in satisfying FPS combat (theoretically) to secure the other party's ship and (theoretically) cargo?

I mean, I know Ben Lesnick is seeing his dream come true with this, but what if Chris learns that Ben and the Wing Commander diehards really are just an endangered species? I mean, if you spend hours with Ben a week, and all he does is prattle on-and-on about Wing Commander, it just might create false impressions about the worldwide demand for said game? What if most everyone who actually wants a spiritual successor to Wing Commander (nerds!) already backed Star Citizen to get it?

Does anyone else think this is a real possibility?

I mean I love me some space games, and have since before SF2: Trade Routes. As it stands, I could not give a rats rear end about Squadron 42. Even if I knew NOTHING about it, and then saw the Bishop speech and the Mark Hamill trailer and read gaming magazine hype pieces, I still would not give one crap for the game. It would take Metacritic scores of 90+ to get me to give it a second look. There is nothing I've seen that would appeal to me.

I don't know if I'm an anomaly in feeling this way. I'd hope for Chris' sake I am, yet knowing what I know about him, I can't.

ewe2 posted:

I was thinking about that reddit thread where Star Citizen members were defined as being part of a cult, and thought it would be an interesting exercise to match with an accepted list. So here is:

Star Citizen according to Cult 101

The TL;DR for impatient readers: there is a core group of Star Citizen players and contributors who exhibit signs of several of the defining characteristics of a cult according to this list.

Cults are generally very controlling organizations, often the higher level members are responsible for policing the group, giving the leadership a level of deniablity for some practices. To the extent of the belief of some Citizens, these cult characteristics do apply. However, the Citizen community can't be said to be a true cult because it is not a physically applicable organization, where all aspects of its members life are controlled. It only displays the superficial aspects of a cult due to the overzealous belief systems of its members.

Aspects which do not fit are generally ones where physical contact would be required. However, should one define "members" as being company employees, there may be cause to revisit some of these points in the future when it is safer for ex-employees to go public.

I am aware of the effect this list would have on certain sensitive citizens, and so would welcome explicit examples for and against each point to add to this document for future reference.

• The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.
  
  Clearly some members display these attitudes, or believe in a version they have fantasised for themselves.
  
  
• Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
  
  Not simply on the RSI forums, they are known to keep records on dissenters and even non-members. For instance, the customer services forum tagging, the following of backers on other forums and sites, and moving any dangerous discussion to a bitbucket known as the "concern" forum.
  
  
• Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
  
  This degree of control is impossible for an online connection. However, there is a level of doubt-suppression involved in the fantasty-world of many Citizens that is encouraged by the marketing tactics of RSI/CIG.
  
  
• The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).
  
  This degree of control is impossible for an online connection. However, within the bounds of acceptable use policy, there is control, and the degree of control of discussion of the game is strict.
  
  
• The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
  
  Clearly there are aspects of this involved in the Star Citizen community. Despite known facts to the contrary, Roberts is held to be a blameless visionary and his defects are ignored or explained away. Similarly, Citizens tell each other how special they are, and believe they will be rewarded for their loyalty and contributions.
  
  
• The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
  
  This is very clear, given their attempts to victimize dissenters, and all sorts of threats against dissenters have been made. The siege mentality of Citizens is also much in evidence.
  
  
• The leader is not accountable to any authorities (unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations).
  
  Not tested, certainly members do not accept any suggested wrongdoing.
  
  
• The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).
  
  Some members obviously believe any action against a dissenter or critic is justified and this behaviour is implied as justifiable by the actions of the company against dissenters and critics. This is not a minor point: actions do speak louder than words.
  
  
• The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
  
  No overt methods from the company here, but it has been seen between Citizens.
  
  
• Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and to radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before they joined the group.
  
  Again, impossible without physical contact. There may well be Citizens who have done this, but as we only have self-reporting to go on, it's a doubtful point.
  
  
• The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
  
  Yes, Citizens are always prosetylising. There are numerous examples.
  
  
• The group is preoccupied with making money.
  
  This rather depends on whether you see cult-like characteristics or long con scam characteristics. But money is the prequisite to joining the "higher" levels.
  
  
• Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.
  
  No, but many do online.
  
  
• Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
  
  No, but again many do online.
  
  
• The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.
  
  I've no doubt some Citizens feel this way, they are the most vulnerable.
  

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Years ago we had a lot of fun theory-crafting how CIG was going to handle instances and players. This was before they went fully open and demonstrated that they could barely handle 20 people in an entire solar system, and instead every encounter would be an instance like a match in Arena Commander. Was an instance going to be player-limited or ship-limited? If it was ship limited, did a player going EVA "count" as a ship? What about NPCs? How would CIG balance the load inside an instance so that one team didn't simply fill it up and the other side would be outnumbered? Unfortunately none of these questions were ever answered, and given CIG's inability to deliver netcode I suspect they never will. The difference between a ship and player-limited instance was pretty critical. If the instance was player limited then it made sense to have everyone be in small ships to maximize individual firepower. On the other hand if the instance was ship limited then throwing a large number of bigger ships with more players made sense. My favorite bit of theory crafting was that, if CIG limited instances by the number of ships, then the easiest way to crash the server would be to take a transport ship full of players and dump them into space.

I miss those days.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

A lot of what we're seeing in terms of "progress" is easily produced fluff. It's easy to hire an artist to make a picture, have an amateur bang out a piece of terrible fiction, or to have two people sit in front of a camera and awkwardly talk about nothing. CIG does these things because they can occur in a vacuum and deliver a lot of "content" for little in the way of time or talent. It's all a giant farce while the actual developers struggle to produce anything while drowning in over half a decade of lovely code and half-assed implementation all while dealing with Chris constantly changing direction and demanding they drop everything to produce a demo. The actual hard stuff like networking, gameplay, optimization, and physics are constantly pushed back or hacked together so that the backers have something to play with. In the context of developing an actual product it seems insane, but in the context of trying to keep a struggling project afloat while hiding the truth from the backers it makes perfect sense.

Don't look at the terrible videos, lovely writing, or constant deluge of new ship sales and concept art in the context of game development. Look at it in the context of a company desperate to present the image of success while dealing with the reality of failure.

Beet Wagon posted:

The posters that come in here and mock Star Citizen or poke fun at the biggest rubes among the backer base are doing it because they think it's funny, or because they're fed up with the project. Nobody - not even me, the 'refunds guy' - cares even the slightest bit about turning people off of the game, or converting backers into doubters. I'll say it again for good measure: nobody cares what anyone here does with their money or whether or not they support the game. The so-called 'refund cascade,' the 'FUD,' the whole lot of all that nonsense is wholly and completely the creation of the paranoid minds of /r/starcitizen.

Toops posted:

Even if your feature design is simple, such as

code:

{"air": 1.0}

Instead of

code:

 {"nitrogen": 0.7809, "oxygen": 0.2095, "argon": 0.0093, "carbonDioxide": 0.0004}

that in itself doesn't automatically make the code simple. See folks, the hard part of programming isn't writing code that does a thing, it's the code that glues them all together, sends messages between all the different systems, and generally makes them work in concert to form a cohesive system, so that every function knows what to do, when to do it, and has the information it needs when they get called on.

It doesn't take programming experience to know that SC's code is a colossal goat-gently caress in this regard. You can feel it. Your intuition knows something is wrong down in the guts. Overall low framerates, massive game locks on the order of seconds, ridiculous collision/clipping issues, unresponsive UI, unresponsive actions (ahem doors, ramps), poor maintenance of state (doors and ramps again), etc. The engine is choking and sputtering like an old lawnmower that sat out in the yard naked all winter, because the information is poorly manicured, and the inter-system messaging is hosed.

If you're interacting with a system in SC, chances are 1 of 2 things are true:
1. That system doesn't have the info it needs and locks up waiting for someone to kindly send it along
2. The opposite; That system gets loving HADOKEN'd with a poo poo-heap of data, most of it totally superfluous, and has to dig through it with a fine-toothed comb to pull out a couple params

In my experience writing game code, this is much harder to get right than most other types of applications, for two reasons, which form a deadly binity:
1. Game code is inherently stateful
2. That state needs to be analyzed, compared with player input, altered, and bundled up into a frame that the video card won't choke on, as fast as loving possible.

You can't wait. If you do, you block the main update loop and boom, the game locks up, chugs, and the hapless player thinks "the gently caress is this poo poo?" Every compute cycle is precious.

A good SC example is when a ship spawns on the pad I'm standing on. Literal megabytes of unfathomably complex data structures describing every nuance of every component of the overdesigned fidelity chariot blast into your game client like the loving Kool-Aid Man, sending waves of panic and abject terror through every corner of your operating system.

Now, let's think about what happens here. This is massively over-simplified, and I added some details to help explain how this data is used, but when some rear end in a top hat spawns an Idris, the server will send you a hulking data structure that looks something like this:

code:

{
  entityType: ship,
  name: Idris,
  model: models\ships\idris\chassis\idrisChassisModel.dat,
  position: {x: 2910, y: 99, z: 194729},
  positionType: world,
  components: [
    {
      entityType: mainEngine,
      name: idrisMainEngine01,
      model: models\ships\idris\engines\idrisMainEngineModel.dat,
      position: {x: -20, y: 0, z: -500},
      positionType: rel
    },
    {
      entityType: rcsThruster,
      name: idrisMainEngine,
      model: models\ships\idris\engines\idrisMainEngineModel.dat,
      position: {x: 20, y: 0, z: -500},
      positionType: rel
    }
... etc

Every one of those "components" are separate entities with their own 3d model. Each one has to be unraveled and loaded into objects (unmarshalled), their 3d model information retrieved from disk and loaded into ram/videoram, assembled according to their relative position, and plonked down into the game world at so-and-so position. As you can imagine, the more poo poo you have to unravel and load, the longer it takes. This is what pisses me off so much about Chris Roberts and his "FIDELETY" obsession. There is a very clear point where there's just too much information to process and your game locks up, the servers poo poo themselves, and the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

So what do you do? Well, you can make the ships simpler, which ain't gonna happen in a million hand-waving lifetimes, or you can defer the processing in order to unblock the main update loop. But that adds complexity, and now you have a state problem. Is the ship there or isn't it? Do I load each entity in its own thread? Well, how do I know when the ship is "assembled?" Surely some will load faster than others which means each ship component will "pop in" when it's good and god drat ready. And do you really think that'll fly in The Chris Robert Fidelity Funhouse? OK, so do I wait for every component's model to load in memory before it's allowed to visually spawn? Well if so, now every component has to report its state to some main-brain statekeeper who stands there with a clipboard checking boxes, then says yep, everyone is present and accounted for, let's glue all these 3d models together and start rendering it. What if we need to add a Hairy Roberts Drinkblaster 8000 to the bridge? How many lines of code will that touch?

This is why SC is getting worse, not better. They barely know what each system will do, and they' haven't even considered how they will communicate. Chris and his ramshackle crew of "game designers" are jamming panicky, poorly-conceived features down the devs' throats, who are forced to plop brittle, rushed //TODO: Fix This code into this witch's steaming poo poo cauldron. And man, I don't need to tell you, it's boiling over.

And so Star Citizen the computer program is just getting worse, and worse, and slower, and buggier, and choppier, and crashier as the bloated, abominable kludge slowly grinds to a halt and eats itself like Pizza the Hut.

This all happened because CIG did it full-on gently caress backwards. Your game designers need to have a really solid idea of not only what the systems are, but how the systems logically interact in order to build a gamified, cohesive logical flow that results in a fluid, contiguous causal map that resembles a game. You need to strip your features of all fluff, avoid details like the plague, keeping them simple, stark, and easy to understand. You need to build and assemble them as quickly as possible so you can prove your concept, and adjust the design when your assumptions don't all come true. Then you iterate, redesign, re-write, and hopefully, if you kept things simple, this isn't a massive undertaking. Code has to be designed to be flexible, but only flexible in the right ways. Too much flexibility kills your code because it's easier/cleaner to write something concrete. Death by a thousand ifs. And it really, really helps when you can do this without having to waste time on premature minutiae, trillions of polygons, sizzle-reel polish, drink machines, jacket layering, loving ARGON, etc.

Now the final coup-de-grace, which brings it home to my original point: Even if you do all this right and keep it simple, things that look simple on paper often blow up when you start coding. Simple components (in this case, "game systems") can fall apart at the seams when they have to start playing with others. But CIG doesn't have this problem, because they've never done anything simple. They still don't even know what their game systems are supposed to do, let alone how to code them individually, let alone how to assemble them into a working game, let alone how to make that game fun.

In closing, Star Citizen is not good, it's not bad. It's nothing. A huge. loving. Nothingburger.

Toops posted:

Star Citizen Defense Playbook:

Timeline Criticisms:

• CIG had to build a company from scratch, including hiring, building studios around the globe, etc.
  
• R&D doesn't count.
  
• All those games had engines already made. CIG is building their engine from scratch. It is called "Star Engine."
  
• Those other games actually started development and R&D way before those dates, don't you know anything?
  
• Star Citizen already has way more content than any of those games.
  
• Star Citizen is doing something that literally no one has ever attempted before. Ground-breaking innovations take time.
  
• Those games are bad because money-grubbing publishers forced them out the door before devs could make them into something good. Star Citizen doesn't have publishers, and no deadlines, so this means Star Citizen will be better.
  
• This new era of gamers are impatient little bitches. I don't mind the wait, I have patience. I keep pledging so Chris Roberts will have as much time as he needs to recognize his vision.
  

Bugs, Lack of Content Criticisms

• Star Citizen is more transparent than any other company, ever. You're seeing how the sausage is made.
  
• There is way more content than they are showing us because they don't want to spoil it.
  
• What are you talking about? I just spent <X> hours playing the game it's great/runs great/no bugs/perfectly smooth/amazing.
  
• You obviously don't understand game development. Bugs like this are totally normal for a game in this stage of development. Have you ever heard of Alpha??
  
• Don't be a part of early access if you can't handle some bugs.
  
• All of those things you just listed are on the schedule, they will be delivered in <patch number>
  
• They are doing a lot of the ground-work tech / pipelines that will pave the way for faster content creation later.
  
• Oh, they already have the tech for <most of new feature that came out of nowhere>, it's not much effort to add.
  

Funding Model, Sales, Marketing Criticisms

• Star Citizen is doing something different. They are bypassing the greedy publisher model only cares about profit and kills innovation.
  
• Nobody is forcing you to pledge.
  
• I backed the game because I believe in Chris Roberts's vision, it's the game I've always dreamed of playing.
  
• All the ships that can be bought can be acquired in-game, therefore not pay-to-win.
  
• The game does not have subscriptions. You can subscribe to help pay for weekly content which gives us insights into game development never before seen.
  
• You're not buying land! You're buying the ability to claim land. Huge difference.
  
• It's not a scam. They have offices all over the world and the game is playable right now.
  
• CIG is not in any kind of financial trouble, just look at the funding tracker.
  

General Rebuttals

• Why are you even commenting if you hate the game so much? What kind of sad person just goes around tearing things down?
  
• Oh look, another Derek Smart alt trying to spread lies and mis-information about Star Citizen because he's jealous.
  
• Known troll/goon. Downvote and move on.
  
• How many AAA games have YOU released?
  
• You are entitled to NOTHING.
  
• Even if the game never comes out, I’m proud to be a part of it, at least Chris is trying.
  

Mirificus posted:

G0RF posted:

Star Citizen is good and the thread is proof.

Statutory Ape posted:

Lol as a person that has paid $0 for star citizen and also never played it, its one of my favorite games

TheAgent posted:

Mocapping a few animations that end up blending into other animations is all fine and good, because its usually a brief second or two of animation that your anim team has to hand scrub anyway.

Mocapping an entire performance gets tricky. If you're not 100% confident of the take, you can have a lot of problems. You get weird wandering heads, eye darting, jiggling jowls, hands and arms and legs clipping through clothes and backgrounds and other characters and a whole lotta other weird poo poo you gotta clean up by hand. These happen no matter how good your take is anyway, but the problems get more severe the less you understand about the technology and the more you utilize it. What might look great on the screen can be very, very hard to translate into a great performance.

What you end up doing, usually, is doing small point captures of various scenes. What no one has loving done because its goddamn stupid, is record 20+ hours of mocapped data. Especially if you don't have the model dimensions down, the scenery already fleshed out. Every rewrite or change is another huge amount of time, money and energy wasted.

So in walks Chris Roberts with his directorial dreams, not understanding the following:

• for every second of footage you shoot in the mocap rigs, it can take up to a ten minutes of dev time per character to fix (sometimes more)
  
• some scenes were shot with many, many characters (up to six to eight)
  
• multiple clothing changes or scene changes can increase this time
  
• the more characters interacting together in a scene, the more time it takes per character to animate correctly
  

You're talking with that 20+ hours of mocap footage alone, something like 12,000 hours of manpower at the very minimum. But wait, this only really works if these are all entirely cutscene type deals with 0 player interaction. Because then you need programmers to script the triggers for the 20+ hours of conversation you have going on.

To get that into a fully working state for 20+ hours of mocap, I'd say that's three to five years of work across art and programming teams, after the principle mocap shoot was completed. It's about fifteen times longer than your average cartoon 3d animated film AND you're trying to hit the highest fidelity ever seen in this media. That means extra work on hair, clothing, textures, shaders, everything for every single character and every single costume has to be absolutely perfect in every. single. loving. scene.

This also means any script changes or rewrites or other problems after the principle shooting has to be reshot, completely redone by the art team and then rejiggered by the programming team.

This also means that the game you're building to showcase this amazing twenty hour long opus needs to be built as well. And you're not just building a single player game, but a heavily multiplayer driven MMO style FPS action game too, with hundreds of not entirely fleshed out mechanics. And if you gently caress up and realize "poo poo, we can't get this <whatever feature> to work right, but we have an hour+ of footage important to the game that needs that feature," you need to go back and edit and reshoot and have your artists and programmers redo a bunch of work again and again and again and again and again and again

Sillybones posted:

I have posted it so many times; how can any coder of any level think that making three games "modules" by three disparate teams and then merging them together later could work? Why didn't anyone loving stop this retard idea? Can a journalist actually pin him down on this one, because it keeps me up at night wondering?

Chin posted:

Ecosystems and planet terrain: Chris: "We're planning to have..." "The concept is that..." "We're definitely going to have..." "And I think that'd be cool, and longer term we're hoping to make it so there will be..."

Implementing ArcCorp, a planet entirely covered in factories: TonyZ: "We've talked about this in the past and basically the idea is that..."

Handling disconnections in multicrew scenarios or players logging in and out on long-term guild run campaigns: Chris: "The concept we're going with is that..."

Ship security: TonyZ: "Eventually we're going to have..." "I can see..."

Stealing ships: Chris: "We will have those systems in." "We wanna make it so..."

Scaling mission difficulty: TonyZ: "Yeah, what we have right now is actually far simpler than what we're gonna have very shortly..."

Environmental or manmade risks in the PU: Todd Papy: "From a design standpoint we want to be able to create..."

Ship maintenance, components wearing out: Chris: "We're also gonna have..." "We've talked about -- it's not in..." "The idea is that..."

Throughout: TonyZ: "Y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know y'know..."

STILL EARLY DAYS

The Titanic posted:

Even the dream of Star Citizen is kinda crappy. People overlook it because everybody thinks they'll be Han Solo and never be dumb enough to be killed. They think they're going to play the heroic savior or kind benefactor or impossible to stop pirate, while avoiding these huge pitfalls. There is cognitive dissonance between looking at what CIG is implying and saying "and what will this be like to actually play?" and since nobody seems to stop dreaming about the impossible long enough, thinking the AIs will be anything more than walking on a track and doing canned animations every few steps, everybody seems to overlook that the game just sounds not fun to play. It sounds punishing. Which might be good for a Pay2Win game though. Suffer on a planet for 10 hours or pay $5 for a miraculous rescue taxi!

quote:

One of the reasons why the people in this thread are so resentful of the project is that pretty much everyone here believed in it in the past. There was a time where the goons had the largest "fleet" in the game.

We believed in the game until it became clear that we were being lied to, tricked into giving money to fund an egotist's voyage of discovery to find out that actually he's not a genius or even particularly visionary.

It's ironic that the continued support of a minority of backers makes us angry at their stupidity, because without them we wouldn't have been able to get almost all of our money refunded. $300,000+ has been refunded to just the people on this site.

I guess it's only fair that we try our best to discourage people from spending more money on the game. Every time they do, they pay money directly into the pockets of people who are smart enough to get a refund. Eventually, probably within the next 12 months, the funding is going to stop and so will the refunds. When that happens, there are going to be a large group of backers left holding the bag - the least we can do is discourage everyone we encounter from being in that group.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/5n0l2a/chris_roberts_in_der_spiegel_sq42_will_probably/dc7s8h7/ posted:

I haven't lost faith in CIG yet. But that's all it is at this point. Faith. A belief that something exists without real evidence that it actually does. With the last minute pull on the demo at citcon, and the unbelievably embarrassing livestream that was supposed to be the end of the year assurance, that faith is quickly fading.

Scruffpuff posted:

I think the safest criticism is that it's a legitimate enterprise that has devolved into something of a Ponzi scheme. From Wikipedia:

"Ponzi schemes occasionally begin as legitimate businesses, until the business fails to achieve the returns expected. The business becomes a Ponzi scheme if it then continues under fraudulent terms. Whatever the initial situation, the perpetuation of the high returns requires an ever-increasing flow of money from new investors to sustain the scheme."

AKA "We failed to build what we thought we could with your money because we're mind-bogglingly incompetent - please buy more ships so we can finish designing the ones earlier backers already paid for."

Unlike a Ponzi scheme, where the guys in charge at some point realize what they're doing, Chris Roberts is too stupid to understand even the most elementary principles of almost any subject imaginable. As a result, you can't even really call this a Ponzi scheme - just an idiot burning other people's money.

Wrecked Angle posted:

For gently caress sake CIG. You're 4 years into development and you have nothing to show. A 30 minute video of 4 middle-aged nerds sat in director's chairs talking about vague ideas of 'this might happen' or 'we're thinking it could be like...' or 'maybe it works like...'.

You've blown through ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!!! Stop loving talking. Go and show me these systems, show me the work in progress, show me the proof of concept, hell show me the loving design documents.

You're promising to make the most ambitious and complex game ever created and you're still talking about concepts for basic functionality like a loving logoff timer... or fuel rods for ships... after 4 loving years!

Do you know what I thought of when I was watching that? Those 'Relay' nerds or whatever they're called. Tell me, what is the difference between Crobbler and Tony Z sitting there talking you through their ~~DREAMS~~ and Dolvak or bowtie dude talking you through his? Neither are gonna loving happen! It's pie-in-the-sky, 'imagine how cool in would be' bullshit which they ask you to pledge hundreds of dollars to prove that you believe.

Don't give them any money. If you've ever given them any money apply for a refund to get it back. This is my Star Citizen meltdown and you can have it for free.

gently caress Chris Roberts.

quote:

1. Sunk cost mentality. Most of the more emphatic backers have put in hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars into "supporting" the game through the purchase of digital ships and game packages. The money itself becomes justification that things will succeed, as the backer considers themselves a smart person and smart people don't pay for scams. This is true for both the individual investment as well as the communal investment of over $140 million.

2. Cargo cult community. At this point the community is largely self-policing, aided by the draconian moderation of the main forums and the inherent structure of Reddit that silences unpopular opinions. They are convinced that Chris Roberts will deliver the promised game in the same way that they remember the original Wing Commander and Privateer with nostalgia. Anyone with a dissenting opinion is either ignored, or has already received a refund and is therefore unlikely to interact with those still immersed in the project.

3. Predatory marketing. CIG's marketing methods are incredibly predatory. They routinely use high pressure tactics surrounding "limited" features or content (LTI, concept sales, alpha access, limited ships) to encourage backers to spend more. They also wall off early access behind a subscription (subscribers get access to the Player Test Universe, the testing server updates go to before they hit the live testing server but after they hit the invite-only testing server), devalue previous purchases by offering cash-only sales, and push the concept of "open development" as a mantra even as they wait to reveal significant information such as delays or a major engine switch.

4. Chris Roberts. For whatever reason Chris Roberts has mastered the art of telling people what they want to hear, especially when it comes to nerds and space sims. Backers are convinced that the game Chris Roberts is developing will be their perfect game, even as more of the game is revealed and is shown to be a shallow, insipid, milquetoast experience. He has a history of doing this in a variety of fields, and backers are all too willing to fool themselves to believe they'll get what they want.

5. Lies. One of the biggest things that CIG has done is created the myth that the community supported CIG expanding the scope and schedule of Star Citizen through additional funding. In reality backers supported CIG expanding scope without increasing schedule through the use of additional funds to generate more content. CIG has repeated the lie so many times that backers believe it to be true.

HKS posted:

Remember when they sold a $2000 ship that can carry 70 players and each will play a separate role and this was all part of a massive MMO and people said yup that's possible?

And then someone was like but I don't have 70 friends? and they said well you can fill it with 69 completely autonomous NPCs that will behave exactly like humans to a degree where you cannot even tell, and people said yup that sounds good?

Some of the smarter people asked 'hey man how is that possible?' and the answer was 'it's Chris Roberts!'.

I remember, just lol man.

Xarbala posted:

I'm glad CIG gave the thread one last big cup of coffee before Christmas

Wikipedia posted:

In project management, a death march is a project that the participants feel is destined to fail, or that requires a stretch of unsustainable overwork. The general feel of the project reflects that of an actual death march because project members are forced to continue the project by their superiors against their better judgment.

Software development and software engineering are the fields in which practitioners first applied the term to these project management practices. Other fields have since recognized the same occurrence in their own spheres and have adopted the name.

Death marches of the destined-to-fail type usually are a result of unrealistic or overly optimistic expectations in scheduling, feature scope, or both, and often include lack of appropriate documentation or relevant training and outside expertise that would be needed to accomplish the task successfully. The knowledge of the doomed nature of the project weighs heavily on the psyche of its participants, as if they are helplessly watching themselves and their coworkers being forced to torture themselves and march toward death. Often, the death march will involve desperate attempts to right the course of the project by asking team members to work especially grueling hours (14-hour days, 7-day weeks, etc.) or by attempting to "throw (enough) bodies at the problem", often causing burnout.

Often, the discomfort is heightened by the knowledge that "it didn't have to be this way"; that is, that if the company wanted to achieve the goal of the project, it could have done so in a successful way had it been managed competently

D_Smart posted:

I will fight this to the very bitter end and at whatever cost.

Gamasutra posted:

If CIG scales back their staff during development it will be a disaster. MBAs and execs tried this during the mergers and acquisitions craze in the 80s and 90s. The logic went like this. Sales are down 50%, we need to cut labor cost by 50%, so we cut out the low performing 50% of employees: The remaining staff should be able to produce at 50% to 60% of capacity (since we got rid of the poor performers). Here's what actually happens: Your good employees that you kept on, jump ship immediately because they worry about job security and want to be on projects with upward momentum. They have to be replaced and hiring costs soar. Those that stay, spend a good portion of their day gossiping and worrying about whether they will still have a job next month. Productivity drops, and that 50% workforce cut leads to 30% to 40% capacity as morale sinks. This has been tried again, and again and again. Scaling work forces like this causes enormous morale issues, which leads to high turnover and low productivity.

Thirsty Dog posted:

Here, have an on-topic post:

Anyone who thinks Lando is some kind of bomb waiting to go off and spill the beans about CIG/Roberts is kidding themselves, you only need to watch some of the vids from Gamescon and you'll see just how eagerly he talks complete bullshit in service of fleecing people for money. He outright makes poo poo up unprompted about what can be done in game, what's in development, and what's just around the corner. I know he looks harmless and sometimes he can act like he's all ironic and poo poo, but he is as wedded to this project as anyone else. He's a cynical motherfucker.

Pity the fresh meat devs who are very clearly out of their depth, not guys like Lando, and don't look to him to blow it all open.

XK posted:

That animation of the Origin X1 is so many kinds of retarded, there's not much to say about it.

I thought the idea of just doing a bunch of space bikes was to keep the new ships sold simple. They're even loving that up.

You know drat well that stupid poo poo with four parts moving around to let the commando get in didn't come from the artist. Then all the pull outs with modules. That's crobbler all the way. No artist would do any of that if somebody wasn't foisting it upon them.

Gravity_Storm posted:

One thing i notice is that Chris never has any kind of notepad with him at the meetings. This says:

1) he goes to meetings to TELL people what to do, he never gets any actions
2) he has not in any way prepared for the meeting he is in.

Tnuctip posted:

If you rearrange no go, it spells goon

quote:

You will have access to planetary surfaces for the first time on three moons (Yela, Daymar, and Cellin) along with an asteroid (Delamar). These new surfaces are expansive[/b]

Oxygen Supply: Many areas, such as space or the moons of Crusader, do not have breathable atmospheres and are dangerous for characters unless they’re wearing a pressure suit. Most pressure suits are equipped standard with an oxygen tank. As you breathe, you will slowly consume the oxygen inside your tank. Your oxygen tank will automatically begin to refill once you are inside an area, station, ship or outpost with a breathable atmosphere. If your oxygen supply runs out, your pressure suit contains a small buffer of oxygen to provide you with a short amount of time to try to find an oxygen supply. If your suit is not sealed or you’re not wearing a helmet, you will not have this buffer. If you do not have any oxygen available, you will asphyxiate and quickly pass out.
Stamina: As you exert more effort by running, jumping, etc., your muscles work harder and begin to consume more oxygen. To keep up with this higher demand, your heart rate and breathing increase to provide your muscles with a steady supply of oxygen. Wearing heavier armor will increase how much effort it takes to do actions and will tire you out sooner. The more you exert yourself, the harder you breathe and the faster your oxygen supply will be depleted.
Heart Rate Monitor: The heart rate monitor on your helmet’s HUD and in your mobiGlas functions as an exertion/stamina meter. As a character exerts themselves, their heart rate increases. If a character exerts themselves too much, they will enter a Hyperventilated state. This will restrict the actions that you can perform, and things like running, sprinting or vaulting will be blocked until you exit the Hyperventilated state. Heart rate and breathing can also effect recoil handling and aim. As your heart rate increases the character’s aim will begin to sway, ranging from a minor wobble to wild drifting. Once levels reach certain critical thresholds your vision will also begin to be effected, slowly dimming till it goes completely black. Once your heart rate returns to normal, so will your vision and movement.

Bofast posted:

quote:

https://go.twitch.tv/videos/180060509?t=2h3m2s

Umm.... that's just ever so slightly cult-like

big nipples big life posted:

I hope someone breaks the NDA soon so I can find out just how owned we are, it's really stressful knowing you are owned but not how much.

darkarchon posted:

Nothing screams fidelity like a seam on a moon.

AP posted:

Monthly Studio Report: September 2017



More motion capture in LA or Austin.

quote:

The Derby Studio was busy moving into the new studio! After spending four months split between two offices, they’re finally back together under one roof where there’s a lot more space.

The Motion Capture and HeadCam systems were set up to run tests with the Audio team, who came down from Wilmslow in preparation for an upcoming shoot. The team also completed a bunch of facial animation and polished cinematic facial animations.

Over the past month, the Animation Team created assets for the Alpha 3.0 release and beyond. They have been updating the placeholder animations for the Player stopping. The goal is to provide a higher visual fidelity and realism to how Players move within the new speed gearing system. Animators also worked on jumping. They needed to balance Star Citizen’s signature high-fidelity look with a manageable amount of assets for when the animation bank is extended to the female model and various stamina types. Plus, they worked on stealth takedowns.

In addition, they worked on developing daily routine and life animations for characters and mission givers. A recent shoot in the Austin office focused on these behaviors, which the Derby team is now tracking and solving. The animators also added more life to the Star Citizen world with conversations characters have as they go about their routines. Finally, on the ship side, the team delivered updates for the Sabre ship set and captured enter/exit animations for the new ground-based vehicles.

New Derby office mentioned.

Sabreseven posted:

See, the 'bug' thing is quite funny and very apt, but I can't take my eyes off all the perfectly straight 'join' lines all perfectly parallel in alignment and all running W-E in the original image, as if googlemaps made the map for this 'moon' from satalite photos stitched together in lines.

See them?

The Titanic posted:

I feel like a broken record sometimes, but SC is built on the basis of an arena shooter with twitch type combat.

Building that framework into an mmo isn't a trivial task, to the point where even very low level core functionality needs to be built with an mmo type framework behind it.

What CIG is trying to do is streamline an arena games networking capabilities until it support hundreds of simultaneous players in a level all with twitch shooter capabilities, moving between different control styles (space, ground vehicle, personal, including all these variants with the option of being inside these objects as well).

Effectively what CR thinks he can do is take something incredibly streamlined like the GTA multiplayer system, which manages to do all these things, except set the player count to 9,000, and it will magically all work because he wants it to.

They're running into network issues not only because they don't have talent, but because they aren't even building an mmo yet; they're still working on a very poo poo tier multiplayer arena shooter framework and trying to ramrod more players into it than it can support. You don't build an mmo by making a basic multiplayer game and then deciding you will just set the maximum player count to 9,000 per "mesh instance" or whatever lies he's told, and it just works because you are so good at motion capture.

Now this is ok because Squadron 42 was supposed to have drop-in/drop-out cooperative stuff. But this is not good for Star Citizen itself, which is sold even today with ships that have more crew requirements than they can even get working over 5 years into development.

Nobody wants to acknowledge this, but based on this, Star Citizen has not even begun development yet.

Tokamak posted:

Lets put development resources into coming up with a watermarking scheme to catch out and punish our most devoted backers for leaking footage of an alpha patch beta. It's the most inconsequential poo poo, especially when it isn't even being passed off as final code. I have no idea why they care so much since the release version is just as broken as the beta. Yet another case of Goon/Derek paranoia dictating development. It isn't a lot of work, but why even spend a day on it?

[User made private some videos that show the game is still as broken as ever. Have fun with your vibrating commando killing ship in 3.0, and then having to pay an insurance claim to fix it.]

his nibs posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2SRffQVbpw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTIysAaJN-w

is it even 3.0?

D_Smart posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/7543k2/first_impressions_from_an_evocati/

quote:

Won't be posting vids or images as that definitely breaks NDA (and is identifiable) but I can give you a general overview about day 1. I made a special account to do this to avoid doxxing but I am a regular poster.
Positives: Item 2.0 revamps look super nice. The details on the new ships really show how much time they've put into them. They look great.
The stamina system and UI changes are fun and top notch. Some animation issues but that can be cleaned up pretty easy.
Cargo is simple point A to point B. Functional (well with the usual alpha bugs). But numbers go up and down.
Moons are moons. Think like smaller ED moons with a bit more terrain. pretty cool. They need to update the procedural generation as many mountain ranges are very clearly just mirrored or identical over small areas.
Negative so far: I average FPS in the teens on my hefty rig. The servers though are REALLY not stable. Anything more than 3-4 people on the server and things just fall apart. Its currently limited to something like half a dozen players in one instance but you'd never notice because you aren't getting that high and not crashing. I've never had an evocati even half this bad. The netcode fixes can't come soon enough.

I am completely shocked that's all he has to report on such a critical and much anticipated patch.



loving they actually think networking is going to get better.

thatguy posted:

New leak from the guy who leaked the other stuff. Looks like he's successfully removed the watermark with a neato filter as well as blurred the names. This leads me to believe we should expect more/longer leaks in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-wMcs-2lbQ

TheAgent posted:

quote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-wMcs-2lbQ

I mean this is like core poo poo

this should not be happening this far into development

it means they need a serious rewrite of their physics, collisions and god knows what else

fuckin lol

I don't think I made it clear -- in that 1 minute video there's at least 3 massively fuckin huge problems they need to address, and since we've seen variants of those same bugs since project inception, I'm guessing it will take at least six months to about two years to fix without adding additional content

just those problems. just those 3 fuckin problems

like how can anyone see that and think "wow they ahve this nailed down! this is going to be awesome!"

no

its poo poo. its going to remain poo poo.

enjoy your poo poo.0

peter gabriel posted:

A person who got super secret access to a publicly funded alpha that is made proudly with 'open development' but only shown to a select few makes a video and has to use video editing software to remove a watermark from it and blur his name to remain anonymous.
The video shows the culmination of over half a decade and $160 million worth of work carried out by 400 people.
In the video a space bike jitters wildly and flickers into view. Over 25% of the 1 minute long video is glitches. The rest looks remarkable in how dull it is.
This is it, this is Star Citizen.

TheAgent posted:

when your spacebike glitches through the hull, sending you out at 12km/second and then the server crashes and you log back on to find yourself in the middle of nowhere but now you can't suicide because of persistence or something and the super harsh death penalty

you call for a pickup from your friend but he's not online so you have to hound him via text to come get you and after 2 hours his ship is finally there and while trying to enter the same loving thing happens and you go whizzing off deeper into the black

and then you go gently caress YOU DEREK SMART and pledge more because its obviously derek smart doing this to you, its always been derek smart because it has to be, it has to be, chris roberts said it was going to be everything and more and more and its fuckin perfect and and and derek derek dereks HUGE COCK gently caress

Mirificus posted:

r/starcitizen_refunds: List of professional game devs with bad things to say about Star Citizen

Yo2Momma posted:

I've found that authority is one of the strongest factors surrounding belief or doubt in Star Citizen. Perhaps unsurprisingly. People gave money because they believed in space game rockstar Roberts. They doubted Derek Smart because of his bad reputation. And as a layman I've generally had poor luck trying to reason with believers through separate evidence and self-constructed arguments.

It's just easier to listen to the simple verdict of an authority figure.

With this thread as basis, I was directed to check Derek's Facebook page for such authoritative statements. It's an oft repeated line that the game dev community is tiny, with everyone knowing everyone, so even someone like Derek has plenty of pros on his Friend list.

I intend to dig them and their anti-SC sentiments up and link them in this thread. A big undertaking, not done in a jiffy, so I suspect I'll be coming back to edit this thread over time. Then link back to it from elsewhere as needed.

Oh, and don't worry about me digging through somewhat personal stuff. I got permission from the mods, and Derek himself, surprisingly.

• George Broussard said in 2015 that SC would take 10 years to make, and that even 300 million might not be enough money. I suspect he is the leading expert on vaporware in the industry.
  
• Mac Senour says Roberts' ego is out of control, just like it was during their time together at Origin.
  
• Industry legends Warren Spector and Richard Garriott has some not too flattering things to say about Roberts' leadership style.
  
• Michael Latham compares Star Citizen to Titanic.
  
• MMO veteran Kirk Black gives an unfavorable comparison between SC and Star Wars: The Old Republic.
  
• CEO Andre LaMothe calls SC a con and predicts that its legal fallout will destroy Kickstarter. He also dislikes the way CIG treats its backers.
  
• Michael Hartman on the risks associated with Star Citizen, and a gloomy view of its prospects.
  
• Kevin Flynn thinks Star Citizen is a hilariously absurd racket. He is jealous.
  
• Anders Backman says CIG has no incentive to ship a game, except if forced by court order. Due to the ship-selling scheme.
  
• Jason Bentley was never impressed by Roberts' approach to game development.
  
• Kornel Kisielewicz is similarly puzzled by CIG's approach to the project.
  
• Dan Rosenthal is glad, for reading about Star Citizen makes him feel like he isn't the worst producer in the world anymore.
  
• David Landau compares Star Citizen to Daikatana.
  
• Scott Bandy said people were leaving CIG at an alarming rate as far back as 2015.
  
• Chad Verrall is very skeptical of SC's chances.

Lladre posted:

I forget with all the stuff that happens with this fiasco, but did we already know that these guys have been making models and ships for CiG?

https://cgbot.com/home-extended/portfolio-2/

It's like every time I turn around they have yet another outside company doing their work. WTF are their crews even doing?

Toops posted:

This whole 3.0 evocati release is still pretty eerie. I feel like a lone wolf gunslinger walking through a deserted gold rush town looking for my nemesis for the final showdown. As a single tumbleweed rolls by I notice there's a bunch of crows and buzzards circling something just out of view.

G0RF posted:

"Soon there will be a jump gate that can take me to the Helios system! I bet we'll have underwater vehicles by then and I can explore the vast depths of Helios II! I'm going to set up deep sea mining operations as soon as its live so I can get a head start carving out my thrilling future as an Oceanic Mining Tycoon!"


But there is no jump gate, there is no Helios, there is no mining, there is no economy. The adventure of a thousand lifetimes starts and ends in your head. But fear not, there is something original already in the game. Consider it a goodfaith down payment on the wonderland of creative treasures inbound soon, the stuff that's going to leave Rockstar, Bethesda, and everyone else in the industry in the dust. Do you like noodle-dispensers with immersion-breaking nods to real employees working for this gaming studio? Capital! You'll find them pretty much everywhere and we've even arranged them into a Stonehenge structure to destroy your immersion and our creative credibility even further...

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Star Citizen.

Blue On Blue posted:

The problem is crisp crobblers should never have been in a management role to begin with

If he had just been a consultant, I bet there would have been a game to play by now

Hey guys make me a successor to wing commander and make it an open world sim, I'll check in every 6 months from my villa in Monaco to offer some advice on direction

you hired all these supposed experts in their field and you just micromanage the living poo poo out of them. I'm surprised more haven't walked out, no one likes to be micromanaged let alone by the likes of a washed up wannabe movie director

Please Chris for the love of god go away for a long time (And never come back)

Percelus posted:

star citizen is my eternal gamer valhalla

bacalhau posted:

So they were trying to achieve this internally using ASIO and attempting to animate based on audio recognition. Needless to say it was a complete waste of time and money.

Shortly after that poll they showed a demo of their new audio system on ATV. They recorded lots of audio of clothing rustling, dog tags jingling, ammo packs clicky clacking - every limb on the model had a wav assigned to its animation.

It was a disaster. They used a stereo mic to record the foley, and because they had so many individual wavs playing when the commando ran down the corridor they had to pan some of them hard left and hard right - already a big no-no for the player character - on top of them already being in stereo.

Even now, with a third party library and sdk handling the positional voice in their 3.0 presentation - the left & right audio channels are the wrong way round.

Character walks to the left, her voice moves off to the right.

So that nice Behringer powered desk that some of you spotted? Yeah, they had the line out hooked up the wrong way round for the stream. Didn't even test their channels. And the big new feature was positional audio. I mean come on.

I'm waiting for CIG to show me one single thing that even reaches amateur level, just one thing.

no_recall posted:

This a main core gameplay loop issue. Which is baffling because nobody knows what its supposed to be. In all the showing which CIG has done, its all with spectacular explosions and easy to kill ships. i.e Railgun missing the cutlass and exploding ($125 maybe?).

Comparing apples to apples, ED's time to kill for class vs class, i.e cobra vs cobra can vary between 5 mins and 30 mins, given both pilots know how to deploy stealth (silent running), recharge shields with boosting out of firing range, use chaff, countermeasures and etc.

In SC however, this is rarely expressed on with $250 ships just exploding in 5 min battles (gamescome 2014 multicrew reveal?), superhornets ripping aurora ($45) to shreds with a single burst, cutlass ($125) doing a 180 without the pilot blacking out and blowing up a $350 glaive with its own missiles. Aside from showing off awesome cockpit animations, bells and whistles, ship ladder animations, cockpit startup animations, all which lend zero to actual gameplay, We don't know or have not been shown actual in-game value of these ships, value in terms of actual combat capability, trading capability, and even stealth capabilities. What CIG often stresses on are how cool or rather how much your signature is dampened by this awesome +$100 hull, and how awesome this ship's engines are or how capable a ship is in combat, without actually demonstrating anything.

Its car salesmanship at its best.

Reddit posted:

What's troubles me is that it was a tech demo more than a gameplay demo. One year to add one mission to a NPC? We're screwed at this pace. What about Cargo? Mining? Wild life? Storytelling? Purpose for anything in the game aside that using a fighter ship?

Scruffpuff posted:

quote:

how? how do you blow so much company money, without breaking the law?

In short, the most extreme cart-before-the-horse development the world has ever seen. Chris Roberts paid several A-List Hollywood actors millions of dollars to get on camera next to his unfortunate wife, and paid tens of millions of dollars for motion capture before they had a functioning game engine and before they knew if they could use any of it.

He spent millions more creating, throwing away, recreating, re-throwing away, and creating yet again several spaceship assets before he had a functioning game engine, and with no consideration as to whether or not those assets would work with each other, the engine, or the aforementioned motion capture. Spoiler: it didn't.

He also spend untold millions of dollars building 4 studios around the world, because successful game development studios have that. The fact that real publishers earned them over time by actually creating and releasing games is lost on him.

They also spent millions of dollars creating a real-life Truman Show analogue consisting of constant video feeds, "behind the scenes", "lore", fake world assets, and thousands of hours of complete bullshit video intended to make it look like they're making progress on a "game."

What Chris did not do - what nobody in CIG has ever done - is decide what Star Citizen is. Nobody has created a game design, nobody has proposed a core game loop, nobody has considered even one single moment of gameplay or how any of this will work. It's just Chris Roberts continuing to exist as the genetic error he was born as. Stupidity is expensive.

The Titanic posted:

Now when he was inventing render to technology for his holograms, it's very critical to understand that this is video games.

If you want a hologram, you clone your model and give it a snazzy "I'm a hologram!" Shader so it looks super cool.

Easy to use anywhere? Heck yes! Just add your "hologram-guy.character" to your scene.

Development time? You've already got the model, just build the shader and textures for it. Maybe what, 2 weeks to make it look like something straight out of a Hollywood movie?

Difficulty in implementation? Equally as difficult as animating any other characters in your game. Shouldn't be hard hopefully if you've got a handle on animation.

Hardware overhead? As much as a character plus that shader, shouldn't be enough to kill a scene where you want a hologram to be. Spawn holo guy in the player's room, then when done despawn it.

That's the logical way, because it's a video game, where "cheating" doesn't exist, only how you creatively do a thing.

Now compare this to CIGs version:

Easy to use anywhere? Need to set up an extra camera and extra entire area around the character in the scene. Basically, it can't be a spur of the moment thing since the scene will need to be built around it.

Development time? Probably between 8-20 months.

Difficulty in implementation? Each scene using a hologram will need the hologram character spawned in some special area other players can't find it, including an additional camera and linking. Every player using it will somehow need to not overlap wherever the hologram guy is at in the world. Will be complex to figure out in a multiplayer setting, and I have a feeling CIG hasn't gotten far enough to figure out how this is actually going to work.

Hardware overhead? Entire character and additional scene needs to be rendered on screen, then rendered again to a texture. A single scene will need at least 3 times the amount of work per frame to render, more depending on how shaders or scene filters are implemented.


Overall CIG spent tons of effort to overcomplicate something that will not add anything that cloning a character in a location would have done.

I guess the only real added benefit is instead of just getting "a character" hologram you can also see the surroundings of that character too since it's a scene with another camera. But that may make the hologram not stand out and look busy, so it they may end up turning off the background scene, effectively wiping out the only real "benefit".

Also it will probably help to kill your frame rate, which for Star Citizen is kind of an expected feature at this point for everything they do.

TheAgent posted:

This is what happens when you outsource big portions of a massive project. This is what happens when all experienced developers with shipped games leave your project. This is what happens when you've been stuck in perpetual crunch mode. This is what happens when you promise, collect pre-orders for said promises, and then begin to try and prototype those promises into existence. This is what happens when you have no firm design docs to guide your project. This is what happens when you put graphics above gameplay. This is what happens when you pick your engine for cinematic feel. This is what happens when you constantly redesign existing assets because they "aren't good enough."

Star Citizen is what happens.

smellmycheese posted:

When you can't even deliver half the things promised by a snarky goon in a leak shitpost from 7 months ago it really is time to pack up your JPEGs and go home

Super Foul Egg posted:

Sandi walks awkwardly onto the stage and picks up a still-warm corncob.

Reddit posted:

CIG has done this many, many times, it's their M.O. They hype things hard and delay by months, if not years. Chris Roberts said we would be playing 3.0 in December 2016. Then CIG showed up hat-in-hand and said sorry guys, it's gonna be June 2017! Now it's almost September. What will happen next is CIG will go silent and the weeks will tick by, no game. They'll change the narrative to make us focus on something else (like Squadron 42, which had a release date of 2015. Then 2016. Now ?). A handful of SC white-knights will attack anyone who questions the new narrative. They will talk in the present-tense about features that don't exist. It's a cycle I've been observing for years. I want Star Citizen to succeed, I really do. But I cannot ignore the enormity of CIG's incompetence, and I make it a point to balance the narrative away from blind faith towards the middle ground.

Slow_Moe posted:

You miss one deadline, it's a tragedy. You miss a million, it's a comedy.

Frontier Forums posted:

There are countless people promising the world or the sky and often enough there are people who so desperately want that vision to become true that they will donate or give money to it. Most of these scams are short-lived tho because people stop caring if nothing ever comes to fruitation. A well managed scam lives from a carrot on a stick and this is something Chris Roberts and his family are pretty proficient in sad as it is. We are basically talking about extortion by now. CR lost my trust back in 2014 and everything he has done since then only confirms my initial impression. I am always amazed how people are willing and able to twist their own perception and willfully ignore obvious flaws and hints in order to "keep the dream alive". Due to the short attention span of todays population the frequent release of ATVs is an absolute MUST to keep the money-train going.

You always have to wake up eventually tho. A dream is just that, a dream and eventually even this one will come to an end.

Frontier Forums posted:

Star Citizen reminds me of a delicate crystal statue. Its looks beautiful but touch it and it falls apart. Its meant to be watched, not played with. Wouldnt that be a shame for Star Citizen?

kilus aof posted:

Star Citizen needs your help commandos. 1 JPEG = 1 prayer.

The Titanic posted:

Latin Pheonix posted:

I was just thinking today; if/when SC does go down, there's going to be lots of unhappy backers who, despite their blind faith in the project, will still be looking for their 'dream' game to be made. Any ideas on where they might turn to? Elite? the new X game? No Man's Sky? Dual Universe? Beyond Good and Evil 2?

Hold on to your panties though because this is going to blow you away.


Ok. Here we go:

The backers don’t actually play games.

They don’t even play Star Citizen when it iterates out.

The game they’re in is a meta social game, and they’re already playing it.

Star Citizen coming out would actually hurt the game they’re currently winning at and enjoying.

They won’t gravitate to another game because they don’t actually want to play the game.

What will eventually happen though is people will get bored. The ELE as it happens may just be the simple fact that they no longer want to spend money on lies. Once their buddies leave their discord’s, and the role play dries up, and there are too many holes in the lore, and the reality of the game solidifies, it comes apart.

I don’t have links to my blog, but I’ll say it again:

Star Citizen coming out and being developed will kill Star Citizen.

It’s fuel is the dreams and fantasies of 40-something’s who are fighting to rekindle a lost art they fondly recall from their youth. CR came in at almost the perfect time to capitalize on this midlife crisis group. Instead of buying their own Porsche’s they’re blowing their money on space ships.

The guys on reddit aren’t funding anything. They’ve already spent their meager amount of money and CIG can collect no more from them. Their defense also isn’t helping anything because the guys funding it ignore them too.

The mmo is happening right now. Once they win it, the money goes away. They won’t invest in another game either. This is the childhood memory game, and soon the midlife crisis will end.

As they get closer to leaving crisis, they’re going to want their money back, too. They’ll probably pay for lawyers as well because they have money to burn from successful and lucrative careers.

The other side of them are the people waiting for it to come out. 3.0 is “that turning point”. The group who isn’t role playing is waiting in the shadows for when their new Eve Online appears. They’ve been lead, oh so wrongly, to believe 3.0 is “that product”.

People are wondering “why stop refunds now? Why before unveiling 3.0 and their biggest achievement??? They’re spoiling their best, possibly last, big opportunity!!”

And I feel you’re only getting half the picture. The other half is what the evocati fuckers have, and are likely filling up their mail with problems. 3.0 is hosed, and it’s bad, and it looks like and plays like a joke of a game; not something a multinational company has been working on 24/7 for over 5 years.

This “stop the refunds now!” is a preemptive play to kill the silent majority of big money whales, waiting in the shadows, who have been paying all along, buying all the stuff, no doubt being fed lies about 3.0 in different methods of communication. Either special forums, private one on one email with their preferred employees, etc.

So really, there’s two fantasy groups who are huge benefactors who need to be stopped before they pull their money out.

1: The fantasy role players playing the game right now (and are almost done with it)

2: The silent majority led to believe 3.0 is where things get real and they can join in to the huge Eve-like mmo universe with a custom character and awesome fleet

Both groups represent huge $$$. Both are about to tucker on out or get real pissed.

Anyhow that’s my hot take. I’m sending this scoop to pixelemonade right now!

quote:

I was a Kickstarter backer and had nearly $500 sunk into this game. I pulled the handle last month and did a refund.
I would've done a partial refund if they supported it (I honestly don't know why they don't) and just got back the money I spent on ships after Kickstarter, but since it was all or nothing, I went with 'all'.
If 3.0 comes out and delivers something not-terrible, I'll probably pick up a cheap ship package on sale, because I'll still play the game if it comes out. But I wasn't going to hang $500 on 'if'.
Honestly, my decision to refund wasn't even totally based off of game performance and delays. It was because Star Citizen was not shaping up to be the game I was sold. I was sold on a game that promised to be closer to a simulator than not, but as of the last patch, they've walked away from everything and it's just turning into a very good-looking, generic arcadey bullshit space shooter.
I backed a space sim, not Call of Duty: Lasers Pew Pew. I waited on the FPS mechanics and was given the most generic by-the-numbers arcade FPS experience, and that forced my hand.

Ponzi posted:

I remember that during the pre-release phase of ED, the pilot's auto head-movement (due to g forces) was automatically turned off when using VR.

Then after one of the updates, this internal setting was accidentally disabled by the devs. The result? No-one could stomach ED in VR for more than 30 seconds because it hosed with their brain. No-one reported that they were fine with it. All reports said the game was currently unplayable in VR.

Fortunately, FD rushed out an emergency patch to fix it and everything was good again.

So the moral of the story - the VR implementation is highly sensitive, and needs to be done correctly, otherwise the experience is just nauseating. All the SC pre-canned animations are going to lead to vomit-central in VR.

Toops posted:

There are some real choice bullet points from the 3.0 patch notes that I find particularly stupid/meaningless/

- Fixed a crash in COrderedMeshBV::Build
(Nice aspberger's guys, glad you made bullet points for each crash you fixed, and the thing that necessitated every crash fix getting its own bullet point was the loving class name that nobody gives a poo poo about)

- "We are working on some extra Graphics code for the GPU particle system to support the creation of new VFX to implement space dust at points around Stanton. This will continue to be iterated on to create some more elaborate assets."
(read: scope creep. see also: loving SPACE DUST???)

- With the gameplay we’re adding in to 3.0.0, we’re conscious that there may be some other players that would love to kill you and take your ship. To help prevent this, we wanted to implement some basic security that will allow you to lock the ship, so only you have the ability to pass freely through its doors. Part of this work includes adding destruction for external ship doors to allow for the other half: basic breaching / boarding.
(read: scope creep. see also: Damage States for the doors we can't get to work.)

- We are very keen to make the Stanton map feel more organic as a real environment and having the planets rotate and orbit will really help with this.
- This will also introduce a proper day/night cycle when you’re on a planet surface which in turn opens up further gameplay possibilities.
(why are these)
(two different bullet points)

- We want to give players the ability to more intuitively interact with items and objects within the game, but also find ways to indicate to the player what type of interaction they would be performing (pick up, start conversation, push button, etc).
(what the gently caress does this even mean, what are you talking about, what kind of patch note bullet point starts with "we want to ..." then describes incredibly vague yet contradictory things... this is pure loving cat drugs)

I can't read any more of this bullshit I'm getting pissed off again.

reddit posted:

Honestly, and unfortunately, the game sounds like a steaming hunk of poo poo.

reddit posted:

How exactly does CIG intend on making an MMO out of this?

Dusty Lens posted:

A common misconception is that the stretch goals were meant to aggregate rather than supersede. So each new stretch goal actually cancelled out the one before it.

The last stretch goal was abandoning stretch goals.

This might clear up a lot of the perceived issues with SC development.

D_Smart posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/comments/76ti3f/wtf_where_do_i_need_to_go_from_here_any_help_is/

Milky Moor posted:

MOONS piled high

The Pi dude posted:

Beet Wagon posted:

Chris has already made it abundantly clear that he has no idea how to deal with the "Have a friend steal my ship and then make an insurance claim on it blammo two ships" issue. At one point he was seriously considering in-game insurance adjusters whose job would be to go around and root out insurance fraud. I believe there was mention that it would just be a job any player could do, like any other mission. There were also some convoluted thoughts revolving around unique hull-numbers and the idea that if you stole a spaceship from someone you'd have to go to a shady dealer to get the numbers filed off which would cost a bunch of money and be dangerous, until it was pointed out that that still didn't solve the issue.

As it currently stands in game ships are incredibly easy to steal. Once the 'owner' opens the door even a single time it will open for anyone, but even if the owner isn't there yet, any ship that has a single turret is able to be entered by going to the outside of the turret and selecting the "USE" prompt that shows up because CIG can't figure out the clipping issues. In many cases getting into a 'locked' ship is as simple as using your EVA nipplejets to thrust into it at full speed and magically clipping through the solid wall to the inside.

e: unless we're talking about some new news about CIG losing my credit card information or something, which in that case just lol

Dooguk posted:

When the ship that your in
Starts to wobble and spin
Get a refund

ewe2 posted:

when you bet all your chips
then the game never ships
you're a moronnnn

ewe2 posted:

when da moon hits your legs
like expensive jpegs
thats fidelityyyyyy

SPERMCUBE.ORG posted:

When your game design bloats
Devs are mod'ling three coats
You're The Chairman
When your hair looks like stoats
And you're sailing on boats
It's crowdfunding
Goons will parp tarp-a-larp-a-larp, tarp-a-larp-a-larp
And you'll sing fidelity
Whales will say early-early days,early-early days
Dreaming in futility

Thoatse posted:

when it's 10 fps
and the netcode's a mess
that's cig

Incitatus posted:

when your surfing pornhub
watching an old tickle rub
that's a sandy

trucutru posted:

When the moon hits your eye
like a big pizza pie
That's an Archer

ZekeNY posted:

When your codebase is crap,
And you shout, "more mocap!"
You're a Roberts

peter gabriel posted:

If your room smells of sweat
And you're thousands in debt
You're a backer

Toops posted:

When you make Star Marine
Flush it down the latrine
You're Illfonic

Colostomy Bag posted:

When the funding is down
Because we employ clowns
Have a ship sale

Colostomy Bag posted:

Will Robert Space Industries provide us with a Carfax? If I purchase a Javelin I want to make sure it does haven't flood damage by flying over some cryovolcano.

BloodyScab posted:

quote:

Clive Johnson CIG@cjohnsonOctober 14th at 02:35 pm
Hi tom5598
You're right that the networking side of things doesn't get the spotlight very often - that's just the nature of the work really.
....
I think sometimes this lack of visibility can be misinterpreted as secrecy or a lack of progress, but neither of those is the case, and pretty much everything we do is shown in the production schedule.
The only things that aren't in there are those that can't easily be scheduled like bug fixing. Also sometimes we need to change priorities and the schedule can lag behind a bit.

To give you an update on the specific technologies you asked about :
Server meshing - not started yet. Our plan was always to make the single-server experience better and more optimized first.
Server meshing is going to build on the technologies we're creating for single servers, so these all need to be in place before we can start.
Also it is going to be challenging and complex work that will need the focus of the whole network programming team, so once we start work on it we don't want to be fighting a war on two fronts.

ZekeNY posted:

kilus aof posted:

All 3.0 leak footage should be uploaded to Pornhub so CIG have to log onto Mae Demming's account to DMCA it.

Some things are too obscene even for Pornhub

Toops posted:

quote:

https://www.twitchcon.com/schedule/star-citizen-how-great-communities-make-great-games/
Star Citizen is an epic, space-based MMO being developed by Cloud Imperium Games… and they couldn’t do it without you! The company has taken transparency to a whole new level by inviting their supporters to look ‘behind the screens’ at AAA game development like never before. Join representatives from Cloud Imperium to learn about how they stay connected with an incredible community of enthusiastic gamers and space fans as they build a new universe together.

Speakers
Tyler Witkin
Tyler Nolin
Matt Sherman
Ben Lesnick
Jeremiah Lee
Moderators
Jared Huckaby

So they're sending a walking moon and a disheveled hobo to discuss how they corral hopeless space dorks into the money pits, hook them up to the milking station, and systematically lie to them in order to meet extraction quotas? Got it.

Then Ben "Moon" Lesnick, Master of Spaceships is gonna do a live demo for the autism showcase panel? Can't wait.

I predict comedy.

kilus aof posted:

CIG are sharpening their whale harpoons.

trucutru posted:

That's the Pioneer, quite likely the "game changer" Ben was all excited about. It's probably going to be the ship you need to buy to setup outposts in planets. If so, it'll make millions.

e: yeah, it is

Omniblivion posted:

This feels like the Real Life version of scamming pubbies that want to get into GoonSwarm in Eve Online.

1) Build this big dream of paradise and how great it is to be part of it
2) Offer people a taste ~for a fee~
3) Drag out the admittance process by claiming that the pubbie is a spy
4) Suggest that ~another fee~ would be a game changer and expedite their admission process
5) Tell them that they are being invited but never actually invite them
6) Have them bring all their stuff to somewhere convenient for us
7) "Accidentally" gently caress them over and take or blow up all their stuff
8) Repeat step 4) indefinitely
9) Most importantly- never, ever, admit that it is a scam.

This is an actual scamming playbook that goons use

CR is either the most genius goon ever or a pubbie sunk by this scam and seeking space revenge

The Titanic posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

Lladre posted:

I am still waiting for evidence to show someone walking upside down on a piece of terrain that has someone else walking normal on it in a no gravity situation.
They don't have it (will never have it) because it isn't a 3d game at all just a bunch of 2d planes getting floated around each other.

You should be able to have someone fly a retaliator upside down to one of the landing pads and then have the guy walk out off the ramp and be upside down to the station landing pad.

Sounds likely to me. Could also explain why magnetic boots were working in 2014, then mysteriously stopped working ever since. I don't have a strong grasp on the "gravity zones" timeline but I remember it was a technical hurdle that any backer will tell you was solved a long time ago.

If the short term fake-it-for-now solution was to make each gravity object (station, ships, bennyhenge, etc) a floating 2d plane; it may have displaced the more complex logic that controlled anchoring a player to an arbitrary surface. A year or two passes and now it's too difficult to take out the short term solution because every ship seemingly takes months to implement thanks to whatever horrible manual process they have.

This is a good example of the CIG MO.

1: We have a problem
2: We sort of identity the problem, somebody explains how easy it is to fix and how they break new ground
3: Problem does not get solved
4: Nobody talks about the problem again
5: Somebody talks about another problem based off of solving the first problem as if they solved it
6: Goto 1

The whole step 5 part is what kills me. And people seem to think it’s completely solved because CIG acts like it is.

Like this weird ongoing struggle with doors. loving doors, man.

Or this constant talk of an MMO when they can’t even get 16 people in a stable environment; and those 16 people aren’t even near each other. There’s no loving MMO in sight.

But CIG pretends like there is, or perhaps I should say lies like there is. They sell ships that require more players than the game can support.

Now they have “base building” but there’s not even housing for people like community apartments. There’s the hangar “module”, and that’s been promised as being something your friends can visit you in since like 2012.

Some day, backers may realize they’re being blatantly loving lied to. Constantly. CIG can sell anything but they can build nothing into your game. They don’t even have basic flight dynamics working well and the game is supposed to be about loving space ships.

Remember a long time ago when Star Citizen was a space game about flying a ship in space? With your pet and a highly customizable space ship?

Remember that?

That was of course before they realized they couldn’t code anything that works. Like I said in my July blog 200 years ago, once CIG came to terms that the best they can hope for now is a very pretty, indie studio grade gameplay, version of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare everything is focusing on how much junk they can fill an FPS game in a FPS CryEngine level now. Space is just a janky module attached to it as a method of traveling between different FPS maps.

Funny enough, back when there was a “race to release first”, Star Citizen naturally failed, and CoD:IW has been out nearly a year now in another month. I’m sure SC it right around the corner now though, especially since it’s got a jank filled, early access poo poo, alpha release of 3.0 with virtually nothing 3.0 was supposed to have.

Any day now.

Any loving day.

For proof of how far along CIG is in development, ask anybody on their forums or reddit sub how trading, LTI, ship repairs, or character death is going to be handled. These are some of basic loving foundations they’ve been selling since day zero, and nobody has a clue. Yeah, it’s almost done though!

kilus aof posted:

D_Smart posted:

LMAO!

quote:

https://twitter.com/GhandiSardiner/status/921007201757663232
The look when you only find out that your #star role as "Vic's Mom" was cut while attending film's premiere #AmericanSatan #StarCitizen

Scruffpuff posted:

Sandi Gardiner, "actress", being nixed 100% from her tour de force as "Vic's Mom" is the most delicious ending of the #actress #Hollywood saga that I can possibly imagine.

She hitched her wagon to Chris Roberts (again) and this project specifically to pad her IMDB profile, use backer money to create reel after reel of useless self-promotion, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with actual acting professionals, and get her face and name on a promotional poster with top billing alongside them. This is what it was all for - this, to Sandi Gardiner, was the full purpose of Star Citizen.

And this is how it ends. Not with a bang, nor a whimper, nor even a PAARP.

It ended with nothing.

Sandi Gardiner wasn't even good enough for a straight-to-the-trashbin release of a poo poo-tier film. Imagine being that bad. That in a film that's cringe-worthy from beginning to end, somewhere along the line, the editor and director sat in the room together and thought, "We have to cut that one. She's dragging the whole thing down."

That's like walking into an open cesspit and pointing out a particularly aromatic turd.

It's a beautiful analogy to Star Citizen itself - which will end in precisely the same way - simple nonexistence.

I couldn't have imagined a better ending.

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

peter gabriel posted:

BloodyScab posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGigO-bvOBo&t=142s

solid stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGigO-bvOBo&t=421s

What a bunch of clowns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGigO-bvOBo&t=1247s

the goddamn doors again lol

TheAgent posted:

hello

quote:

Stop trying to get refunds. Your money, that you gave us, is gone. It went to developing dreams; not yours, but the people in charge here. You paid for them to live out their dreams: Ben, who finally got to work with his idol; Sandi, who got back into acting; Chris who got to direct an absolutely stellar A list cast. For everyone else, you've given them hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to pursue whatever they want to do. I'm sure they thank you for helping them do what they've only dared dreamed.

The rest of us politely say "Stop emailing us asking for your money back." I know the official line is that everything is great and we are making money like crazy, but it's not. Things here are dire. They've been dire for awhile but you can feel the shame and terror every time you walk into the building. I know this is coming off harsh. I don't care. I'm sick of working here and I'm especially sick of the whiny emails I continue to get. What did you expect?

I cashed out four months ago via GM. If you can sell a ship to a buyer, take it. Take it for half. Just take it.

You can also email and ask for a partial refund for 10%. Those we will approve without a problem, although it might take six or eight weeks to process now. Otherwise, stop asking, stop emailing and stop whining. Just stop.

BloodyScab posted:

Just read dereks blog

G0RF posted:

In honor of the CitCon presentation that CIG has spent months preparing.

YOUTUBE: Chris Roberts talk about creating fake demos to trick Publishers into think you're further along than you actually are...

Beet Wagon posted:

illectro posted:

Jared and Ben both have SA accounts, everything in SC has goons involved.

Let's be real, almost every choice CIG has made at any given step during this has been the gooniest possible option. It's goons all the way down.

Foo Diddley posted:

https://clips.twitch.tv/EncouragingAmorphousPastaDuDudu

Disco Lando: "The game is practically finished y'know at this point"

Latin Pheonix posted:

The game is both almost finished and barely started; it is trapped in a quantum state until you release 3.0 and the waveform collapses.

Chin posted:

Lando two days ago:

Chin posted:

Lando: "And, uh, in many ways we're just getting started."

BloodyScab posted:

quote:

That session was as cringey as I imagined. I loved the condescension toward people questioning how long it's taking them and that their development cycle is completely normal. Also, Jeremiah jumped all over the guy who has $200 in the game when he politely asked about feature creep.

Fuckin pansy comin in with the weaksauce feature creep crap. Its not 2013. Its fuckin October 2017 we are on Thetan level 12 here get with the fuckin program

Like get fuckin real you know the score, either stay bought into the cult or leave.

Beet Wagon posted:

lol their new turret thing is insanely dumb and it makes me glad I got rid of my Retaliator. Slaving your turrets is going to take away slots for upgrading other poo poo in your idiot stroller

quote:

For each turret you wish to be AI controlled i.e. it engages and tracks independently of player or NPC input, you need to have a Blade equipped for that. Ships that come with these types of turrets either have these blades already installed or additional computer items to hold them in, as blade space is restricted. This is designed to force players into choosing between adding this feature or other blade features when customizing your ship.

Blue On Blue posted:

MilesK posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAabMDydq4Y&t=530s

Over 1,070 professionally produced youtube videos.

When you consider the key to brain washing is cycling people between boredom and overstimulation, Star Citizen makes a lot more sense.

Why are they so proud of wasting money making youtube shows?

THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE MAKING A GAME

tooterfish posted:

quote:

"Star Citizen is an epic* first person experience spanning hundreds** of solar systems, where players can fly highly detailed spaceships, battle on foot through massive*** space stations, explore life sized planets****, and discover adventure***** in an ever expanding****** and changing******* galaxy********."

*Epic is subjective, so I'm not lying!
**One is just one hundred that's been truncated a bit, so really if you think about it I'm not lying!
***Massive depends entirely on your point of view. For example, if I stand next to a dollhouse I look totally massive, like Godzilla! So I'm not lying! (Ben looks massive stood next to anything though)
****Scientific consensus gives the minimum required diameter for definition as a planet as 2000km, so our planets are technically smaller than anything you could sensibly call a a "life sized" planet. However there is a general classification of "minor planet" for things they can't be bothered to call anything else and there's no lower limit for those, so I'm not lying!
*****Some of our retarded cash dispensing morons valued customers seem to enjoy pushing an entirely client side vending machine around. This is technically an adventure (it gets especially tense near ramps!), so I'm not lying!
******The ship you bought that was marketed as the premier dog-fighter that punches above its weight? It's now a biowaste reclamation truck, literally a poo poo hauler. Don't worry though, it still punches above its weight. Oh and I think you'll find that's a "change", so I'm not lying!
*******Some may argue a single solar system can't be classified as a galaxy, but I disagree and if I could concentrate for more than 4 seconds I'd give you a good reason why I'm not lying! Buy an Idris, the coke's running out, and the screeching wails of my wife lamenting the state of her acting career are starting to set my teeth on edge!

SomethingJones posted:

Frederick Brooks
https://www.wired.com/2010/07/ff_fred_brooks/

I cannot believe I've never heard of this guy.

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
"Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment."
"How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time."

His book 'The Design of Design' sounds fascinating.

Toops posted:

Yeah his insights are more true today than flipping Moore's Law.

Read The Mythical Man-Month. Also, read AntiPatterns. It will explain CIG almost perfectly.

I mean just look at this list:

- Cart before the horse: Focusing too many resources on a stage of a project out of its sequence
- Death march: A project whose staff, while expecting it to fail, are compelled to continue, often with much overwork, by management which is in denial
- Ninety-ninety rule: Tendency to underestimate the amount of time to complete a project when it is "nearly done"
- Overengineering: Spending resources making a project more robust and complex than is needed
- Scope creep: Uncontrolled changes or continuous growth in a project’s scope, or adding new features to the project after the original requirements have been drafted and accepted (also known as requirement creep and feature creep)
- Smoke and mirrors: Demonstrating unimplemented functions as if they were already implemented
- Brooks' law: Adding more resources to a project to increase velocity, when the project is already slowed down by coordination overhead.

I prefer the Brooks' law definition that goes like this: "Adding more people to a project that's late will only make it later."

Source

Truga posted:

Yeah, you kinda need to know how your networking is going to work and then work from there. You can get away with a lot with their model (authoritative server/predicting client), but it's a model that only really works well for simple games with not too many moving parts, like shooters.

Take something like battlefield for example, it seems complicated at first, you have tanks, choppers, you can see how many people are in each, and so on. But making games is all about cheating as much as you can, so each vehicle is serialized to just 1 actor in netcode, with pointers to people in them, and then hit points, position, orientation (+ turret orientation, if it's a tank) and speed (for prediction purposes), and generally these games only run at 20-60 ticks per second and the rest is filled in by your client's prediction, which it does by running the same game as the server at a higher tick rate, and adjusts every time it gets an update, and it does all the pretty poo poo that happens on your monitor like calculating suspension physics etc.

So you get away with clients not needing much bandwidth, since there's a max of like 80 very simple mobile actors on a map (max players + max vehicles), less if there's many people in vehicles. Grenades, tank shells, bullets, etc all get simulated on each client completely independently, the clients only get the "player throws grenade in direction", the server then just confirms hits when needed, which is why you once in a blue moon get killed by a grenade or bullet that wasn't there on your client due to local error due to latency/packet loss/whatever.

Meanwhile in star citizen every ship is like 47 actors, and spawning in a medium sized ship sends like 10MB of data over the internet so the correct variant with the correct guns, tv, shower stall, thrusters and outhouse spawns in your game, during which all the clients must wait (and, in the case of star citizen, they don't even render new frames while waiting apparently, so the game stutters to gently caress constantly. who the gently caress makes the renderer wait on network I/O, jesus loving christ is this 1991?), and then it sends 43 different thruster updates every tick because they swivel and exhaust at random and everything grinds to a loving halt.

At these amounts of data to track you should be using lockstep (all the clients are calculating the exact same things and only player inputs that modify results + a heartbeat to stay in sync get sent between clients), but lockstep is a slowass piece of poo poo that works really well for RTS games where having half a second of delay between click and shoot doesn't matter (see: warcraft 3, runs exactly the same with 2 players and 12 players at max capacity), but would be absolutely terrible even for the spacesim part of the game, much less star marine.

Oh, also, the server in SC isn't very authoritative after all, it just believes any input the clients send, so cheating is the easiest thing on earth. Or at least, it was that way when I last launched the game 2 years ago, though I see no reason that'd have changed, seeing how nothing else has.

Toops posted:

Let's ponder persistence for just a second. From what I've seen, CIG has only a few of these items currently "persisting."

So let's say I'm flying in a ship, and I have a smaller ship inside my ship. Someone is sitting inside the smaller ship.

Now, let's say I disconnect. What happens?

At this simple point, here's an abbreviated list of what we need persisted so that when I reconnect, I can resume what I was doing:
- what ship I was in
- the ship's coordinates in 3d world space (x, y, z)
- the ship's rotation in quaternion world space (w, x, y, z)
- ship's loadout
- contents of ship's inventory
- state of the ship's doors
- state of ship's lights
- landing gear and other ship "stuff"
- health/damage state of ship
- remaining ammunition on ship
- fuel level of ship
- did I remember to lock the ship?
- remaining beverages in hairy robert's cocktail machine
- the state of other ships inside my ship (which includes everything listed above)
- my specific 3-d coords (x, y, z) relative to the ship
- what color space underpants I was wearing
- is my space helmet on?
- my health, THC levels in bloodstream, etc
- my weapon loadout
- my character inventory
- mission statuses
- my current amount of available spacebux
- all my various reputations
- UI/HUD settings
- is my friend still in the ship? if so, where?
- is that ship still in my ship? where? What are its states?

Every bullet point is data that needs to be stored server-side in the database. Most of them will span multiple tables, if not multiple schemas (like ships), and you'll need specific queries for each entity type, as well as all the joins, that can create, read, update, and delete that data. Think of how much work you need to do on the back-end when crobberts wants to add a new ship feature. Update all the databases, add/remove columns, create new tables, add new queries and/or re-write old ones, change the code that interacts with the database, change the nectode which sends/receives it, change the clients, etc.

There are so many types of things (domains, entities) that you need to constantly sync to the database so that if the server goes down, or when people connect to the server, they can get in sync with the game. And everyone is constantly reading from and writing to the database, sending that data over the network. How many edge-cases can you think of that could cause problems?

It's always the details that get you. Fidelity is a warm gun. That's why almost every early access game starts strong (well, almost every EA game...). They get a few prototypes out, everyone's excited. Then they pivot hard from "Hey, this might actually be possible" to "Holy gently caress every little tiny detail is way harder than I thought, and none of them are working right, and even the stuff that works right feels like poo poo, I have a massive backlog of bugs already, I need to refactor 3/4 of my work because it's rushed and messy, we're way behind, we're running out of money, we probably need a top to bottom re-write of our core features, and I can't survive on 3 hours of sleep and cold ramen for much longer or my wife will leave me and take the children and I will have a mental breakdown."

reddit posted:

Cheap knock offs mostly have fake trailers with "not actual gameplay" footage, pretending to be like SC.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

reddit posted:

And I'm back with another email excerpt with a very busy Avocado friend. Here's more questions with a lot of long answers and no filter or edits.

Q: How's testing this week?
A: So far, we've had 4 new patches each smaller than 1GB, thanks to the delta patcher.

Q: How's performance in the most recent patches?
A: E and F were dogshit with constant 30K errors and CTDs. Patch G gave me 60FPS on the US server for the first time, and it didn't drop me to less than 30 FPS on a full server. Other Avocados reported occasional errors and CTDs, but I was able to test for a couple hours at a time and I was able to visit a few outposts in all 3 moons and Delamar without crashing constantly. Then 3.0H came around as an 800MB patch along with the Gladius-Moon focused testing and my FPS tanked back to the 20s, presumably because we were stressing full servers with as much Avocados as possible in staggered waves with military precision. That happened last night under Proxus and Underscore's direction while Ahmed pulled the server plug after each wave.

Q: Have there been more directed tests?
A: Besides the ones I mentioned already, no. Trading Kiosks are open for testing with the latest patch, so we might get cargo-trade-focused testing runs this weekend.

Q: Have there been new things to test since our last chat?
A: Some ships that were previously broken or floating off the landing pads are now able to be tested, like the Vanguards, Connies, Prospector, Merlin, and others. The Ursa is drivable again and the bikes are less jerky, so you can haul them to the moons and use the race track. Biker gangs are a thing now, and formation flying and QTing is online via quantum linking of ships using the COMMS MFD. Cargo and trading kiosks came online with H, so we can buy and sell cargo now with 0 profit. 1 SCU of cargo costs 10aUEC each and we can choose what ship to store them. The Caterpillar seems to have the most cargo capacity AFAIK. The Port Olisar to Levski run is the farthest and longest run, but it's satisfying to me. You can find cargo boxes you can carry from derelict sites and outposts that you can then sell, assuming you don't crash or get the dreaded errors.

Q: What's your favorite thing to do in 3.0?
A: Seriously? Cargo runs and exploring unmarked moon outposts. Each one has its own company or style, ie Rayari, ArcCorp, Benson, etc.. Some outposts are just small shelters, while other outposts have everything you need to settle in and take off your space suit because it has breathable atmosphere. You mean the interior? Yeah some have ASOP terminals, cargo boxes, office rooms, bunks, storage rooms, small kitchenettes, space weed rooms, laboratories, and creepy teddy bears. Outside the outposts, there are landing pads where you can spawn vehicles, various mining and industrial structures, solar panels, communication towers, and what look like moisture farms which explain the interior atmosphere in large outposts. Some outposts have NPC outlaws that you can kill to access the interior. This is done through the missions app with different categories like job, investigation and retrieval, but the mission system still needs some fixing and tweaking.

Q: How are the NPCs this time around?
A: CIG enabled them again, so they're running around Port Olisar and Levski, fixing poo poo, manning various stores, leaning on walls, scratching armpits, sitting on benches, having inaudible conversations, etc.. There's no NPC ships that fly around just yet. I'd prefer it that way for ETF testing because Port Olisar is busy enough as it is with space ATC enabled and dipshits loving around instead of following directions or using ATC. Miles still can't be interacted with, but I'm sure CIG is working on it.

Q: I'm sorry to ask again. When do you think we'll get PTU? CitizenCon?
A: That's way too optimistic. We just started the second phase of ETF testing aka cargo and trade. We've yet to really test the missions system. My honest prediction is not in November or December. I know the public is dying to get their hands on 3.0, but realistically don't expect it by Christmas to be brutally honest. There's a probability that CIG will open it up to PTU on New Years' Eve, but that's pure speculation and optimistic at that. I don't like to speculate, so please stop asking me about dates.

"Hey everyone I just got a leak that everything is amazing and we are all in 60FPS biker gangs and flying in fleet formation through canyons and ships and people are everywhere there are NPCS and so much activity and mechanics going on! The style of all the amazing outposts and features in them alone!"

"WOW, I guess this $850 purchase is completely justified now! Just read those leaks!"

Rad Russian posted:

Let me guess, they decoupled client fps from server ticks to boost it but now physics get completely out of sync and it crashes the client. It's one or the other with ScamEngine!

There is literally no other explanation of getting a 3x-5x boost with one patch. It will also backfire horribly down the line to just do it like this, without first introducing an extensive networking redesign of the engine.

Quavers posted:

"Crashing With Fidelity"™

Star Citizen: now crashing to desktop at higher frames-per-second

Daztek posted:

shrach posted:

Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd filed their 2016 accounts today. Oddly the Companies House website now says they are processing for 5 days, but they were fully readable before. Here is my blog of things I made notes of as I browsed the accounts.

Consolidated
This year they filed their consolidated accounts. This means that rather than being just that company, the set of accounts is consolidated to include all the subsidiaries. Any transactions between subsidiaries/parent are cancelled out.

Intellectual Property
The accounts preparation improves year on year as errors get picked up. I've pointed out the IP issue before and it's now apparent what happened here.

On the 1st of July 2015 CIG UK paid £1,359,185 for Intellectual Property. This isn't entirely clear but the suggestion would be that this was for the worldwide rights to Squadron 42. The sale of intangibles for £654,612 was the US rights of Squadron 42 being sold to Cloud Imperium Games Inc. Because of apparent errors in earlier sets of accounts we can't be sure where that £1.36m actually went to, it could quite easily be to Chris Roberts himself, or a personal services company that is essentially himself.

Fixed Assets
These are actually broken down for the first time since they filed consolidated accounts. In the UK they've spent a little over £1m on computer equipment to December 2016. £400k on Fixtures and fittings. £300k improving the leased premises.

Goodwill
This is an accountancy term that represents the extra cash paid for an asset. If a company has a value of £34,851 and you pay £440,000 then in your company's set of accounts this is recorded as an investment of £440,000. In your consolidated group accounts however, you include the activities of the subsidiary. Because of this, you do not include that investment of £440,000. You reverse it out through a set of journals which includes the value of the assets at £34,851 and the goodwill figure of £405,149. The goodwill is then amortised (written off) over, in this example, a five year period.

As you have no doubt guessed, these are the actual figures for Cloud Imperium Games Ltd's purchase of Foundry 42 Ltd from Erin Roberts et al.

Related parties - mistakes
Note 20 on Related Parties Transactions. Accounting errors. All amounts are actually due to the respective companies, but they are in brackets so the lines that currently read "due from" are correct (Like a double negative).
It's an easy mistake to make, but it's surprising that a professional auditor wouldn't notice it instantly. All three disclosures should really read something like, "Amounts due (to)/from" and it would be easier all round to understand and avoid mistakes such as the one made.


Related parties - analysis
There's three US companies under Chris Roberts control that have transactions with the UK group. These transactions, from a standard accountancy point of view, are sort of nonsensical. The flow of money however keeps changing and changed again in late 2016.

1. Roberts Space Industries Corporation. This continues to be the main money pig. The UK group tells America how much to pay and they pay. "Costs recharged in the year" is turnover for the UK group. As the American company settles these, a balance remains. Because of poor planning, Roberts Space Industries Corporation has actually settled more costs than the UK has recharged. The balance comes down as they adjust (Compare 2015 and 2016).

2. Cloud Imperium Games, LLC. This one is interesting. In early 2015 it relinquished the role of funding the UK group that is now undertaken by Roberts Space Industries Corporation. Now we learn in late 2016 it has gone to being dependent on the UK group for financing. "Costs recharged in the year" is turnover for the UK group. In 2015 it is a positive and in 2016 the figure is in brackets, which means it is no longer turnover for the UK group but an expense. Apparently some US expenses were actually paid by the UK group, so this figure is netted off that which is due to the American company.

3. Cloud Imperium Games Texas, LLC. This is a brand new entry for the UK in 2016 and it only has one figure. "Costs recharged in the year" is turnover for the UK group. However, this is a figure in brackets, which means it is no longer turnover for the UK group but an expense. We know this was done in late 2016 because the amounts for both CIG US companies are relatively small and remain unsettled at the year end.

Related parties - conclusion
What this means is that they have once again refactored the way the money moves around the companies. All sales continue to be made and received by the US companies and flow to Roberts Space Industries Corporation where it is funneled to the UK and distributed in the UK but now, going forward some will then flow back to the US to pay for Cloud Imperium Games(, LLC and Texas, LLC). Pointless.

Financial Risk Management
"The Company does not actively use financial instruments as part of its financial risk management." I'm not sure how this ties into the reddit hivemind and the infamous Sunday panic statement by Ortwin. It seems pretty unlikely however that the "pay day loan" was some sort of hedge against currency exchange rates.

Completely Speculative Conclusion
Steps have been taken to change the flow of money. It appears going forward (and this means since December 2016) that perhaps nearly all the income is going to be funneled to the UK from the USA. Some of this is then moved back to the US to cover expenses in Texas and LA. This would have the appearance of higher income in the UK group. We know in 2017 that CIG UK put up a lot of collateral to secure loans. It would be in their best interest if the interim management accounts provided to banking institutions showed more turnover. Also beyond just the vanity of a higher turnover figure, there's the fact that the UK is now receiving its funding before studios in LA and Texas for example. The sort of thing a lender in the UK might stipulate.

Mr.Tophat posted:

Come For The Dreams, Stay For The Autopsy

SomethingJones posted:

ManofManyAliases posted:

hot balls man no homo posted:

Every year Foundry 42 in Britan gets a tax credit for making a game with a certain amount of "Britishness" in it. Based on what they earned last year it was estimated to be around 5 million this year, payable in the fall. However! The took out a loan from Coutts bank sometime earlier this year for an advance on the tax credit they were going to receive. They just had to put up all the Squadron 42 assets as collateral in the event that they don't make it to the fall to cash in that tax credit.

Essentially they risked their whole company for a month of funding, not unlike getting an auto title loan to pay your electricity bill. It might keep the lights on but you are in pretty bad shape if you're even considering it.

They hedged brexit, because the value of that credit may have dissipated by that time.

The "hedging Brexit" excuse originated on Reddit btw and it is complete and total bollocks.

They are so reliant on the tax credit every year that they had to take out a loan 6 months before it was due in their account. Anyone with the slightest modicum of intelligence can see that. The fact that they took it out in the UK meaning we all got to see it in the accounts implies the company is up to their loving eyes in debt.

shrach posted:

This was a summary of the activity of CIG UK specifically that strips out the inter-group transactions:

Sources of funding:
£710k Long Term Loans
£290k Short Term Creditors
£200k Shareholder Investment [1]
£650k Sale of IP to USA company
============
£1.85m Total

Outgoings:
£440k purchase of Foundry 42 Ltd from Erin Roberts and others [2]
£ 50k Admin Expenses
£1.36m IP purchase from USA company/Chris Roberts?
============
£1.85m Total

shrach posted:

Even the simplest concept like turnover isn't straight forward for the UK group. The parent company, Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd and Foundry 42 Ltd, basically have zero turnover. It gets zeroed out in the group accounts. The only company that has actual "turnover" is Roberts Space Industries International Ltd. The one with the £1 balance sheet that is really a non-trading company.

But even they are uncomfortable with this being turnover. It's a non-trading company and the accounts make different references to it. This behaviour (calling your headline turnover, "costs recharged in the period") is not in any way standard. I've never even heard of this term before in an actual accountancy setting. It's strange but another first for CIG I guess.

shrach posted:

I updated my wildly optimistic cashflow estimate for Star Citizen. The main assumptions made are the low costs for running companies in LA, Texas, and Germany compared to Manchester. Also that Subcontractors are really cheap. Yeah. I also assume that they receive $36mil this year in pledges and that refunds all time are negligible.

In this fantasy best case scenario the end of 2017 sees a cash balance of around $13mil with bank loans of $5.5mil. Obviously they could pay the loan off, but then they would have cash of $7.5mil.



It's worth thinking back to June 2017 though. At the end of June, Star Citizen would not yet have received their tax credit rebate in respect of 2016 some $4mil, also no estimated bank loan of $4mil against 2017 tax credits. Also their half year income was only $13mil compared to the yearly $36mil estimate. Expenses would have been half a year's worth. Working capital would have been tight in places. A more realistic/pessimistic estimate than mine would probably include bank loans in Germany and the United States and higher expenses in these places. It is really surreal that they still need to hit $177mil in pledges this year and this can be balanced directly with the product available at the same time, not any future product which will require ongoing funding.

TheAgent posted:

and this is from loving jan 2017 lol

TheAgent posted:

hello

all of these are god knows how credible

• chris roberts is transitioning away from any game or art design to focus more on company matters
  
• someone close to chris (sean tracy??) will be handling all end stage design and art approvals
  
• expect 3.0 features in 2018 at the minimum
  
• sqlude is still scheduled for this year
  
• sqlude is working off a different engine branch than 2.6/3.0 (???)
  
• mocapped assets are undergoing redesigns (again)
  
• some mocapped characters have changed due to rewrites, causing dialogue to be re-recorded
  
• crawling/wall/fast attacking vanduul were too "problematic," will now stand and fire normally
  
• AI still broken (shooting through walls, instakilling the player, animations not firing correctly, spazzing out into the great beyond on death anim)
  
• netcode still broken
  
• updated design docs are forthcoming and will detail some "minor" changes to scope
  
• larger ships with full player crews will be hamstrung fighting against AI ships until problems are fixed
  
• larger battles are still not possible (2018/2019 minimum) and SC will focus more on smaller player driven skirmishes
  
• end year sales "barely put our nostrils above water"
  

TheLastRoboKy posted:

AbstractNapper posted:

Does cymelion throw these fits only around the major CIG public events, or is he constantly in a mental breakdown mode?

Or is a deep undercover goon malfunctioning?

Stay tuned for answers and more meltdowns as the scam unfolds.

Patience is in short supply with lots of backers and they're all starting to eat each other while getting constantly poked by people making fun of them. Every Gamescom and Citizencon they declare that Derek Smart and the trolls have been defeated and every time they don't get what was promised and everyone keeps mocking them. Cymelion is in that fun position Beer was in an age ago, where he still wants the project to succeed but he has some issues with the decisions being made and my guess is he is getting really tired of copping poo poo from both sides of the fence for it. He has to constantly clarify that he's still a believer to avoid being called Derek, and I think he might eventually get to the point where he realises he's seen how this ends and it's usually with the community holding up the digital head of the "Heretic" up on a pike for all to see. Maybe he's taken part in it before, maybe not. But no matter how rational he thinks he's being the dumb angry irrational crowd he's trying to appeal to will still string him and and then look for the next heretic because hey, they seem to keep finding them.

If that happens then the worst case scenario raises its head and I don't think he'll like it, because the worst case scenario for them is realising that the Goons were right. Which means Derek was right. About all of it.

It might be better to just walk away from the subreddit rather than deal with that, but that might be on par with getting a refund.

trucutru posted:

He's the real deal. A part of him deep inside knows that everything is hosed so lately he lashes out at the smallest provocation. Nowadays you just have to mockingly call him a friend and he goes mental (I guess this is due to some -related trauma). At the same time (IMO) he really, really, really wants to be part of Evocati and is insanely jealous of not being able to play the latest version of the game he has spend thousands on, as he's a concierge, an upstanding citizen, smart, handsome, and all that jazz.

Years ago, he used to be full of hope. But nowadays he's just a wraith-like husk of a citizen.

X-Ultron posted:

I just installed my Star Citizen SSD.

TheAgent posted:

Kosumo posted:

What the gently caress ---- $290,000 of sperg spending on internet spaceships in the last hour?

Crazy

and Sad.

They always have about 2,500 to 4,000 people who buy whatever new ship they sell, no matter the price.

HycoCam posted:

For comparison:

Latin Pheonix posted:

In case people missed it due to Citcon excitement, today's Burndown summary:

- Crash/disconnect problems mentioned in Evocati confirmed, testers/devs have no idea why it's happening.
- Erin getting frustrated as to why fixes are taking so long.
- Something about networks, I honestly couldn't understand the guy's accent. Something about aiming to get the ping down so that the game reaches 30fps?
- They're still not sure what exactly the point of the evocati are ("We use them mainly for networking and performance" "don't we want them to give gameplay feedback?").
- More schedule shuffling.
- Bug with shops where the shops just don't work (no items appear), apparently they had this problem before; Erin: "Can't we just fix it like we did last time?".
- Bug with icons appearing huge.
- Airlocks stopped working, again .
- Dev: "We're finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel" .

Daztek posted:

Radiant AI, BUT BETTER.

tweaktown.com posted:

Intel has teamed up with RSI for the 900P launch. When you purchase an Intel Optane 900P Series SSD you will receive a free license for Star Citizen.

Also included with the bundle is an exclusive digital Star Citizen spaceship called the "Sabre Raven".

peter gabriel posted:

i cant watch this poo poo it's like QVC

bandaid.friend posted:

Worth Clicking: https://clips.twitch.tv/RamshackleIronicChamoisTooSpicy
Disco Lando: "And this year of course we are fullfilling the CON in our CitizenCon"

peter gabriel posted:

holy poo poo twitch chat is wall to wall brutal as gently caress

thatguy posted:

HEY GUYS WE CAN WALK ON THE GROUND! DON'T BELIEVE US? HERE'S OVER AN HOUR LONG VIDEO WE MADE OF US WALKING ON THE GROUND.

bandaid.friend posted:

The audience broke into applause when they saw the character leaving footprints with a dust effect

Latin Pheonix posted:

Empire on the Move Summary

- Room was pretty much empty because everyone went to play 3.0.

First presentation:
- How to make an NPC look at the player 101. (NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE!)
- No seriously, this is being talked up like it's some breakthrough.
- He runs the basic IK side-by-side with their 'enhanced' version and the difference is negligable.

Second presentation:
- How to animate walking with fidelity.
- how to show characters walking/standing on slopes.
- Character looks like he's walking on two shattered ankles.
- Devs show how they make a character walk on uneven surfaces, stuff that any game has been able to do for several years now.
- Comment about how network-intensive a lot of the animations are.
- How to walk on planetary surfaces, for some insane reason the 'drawn' floor doesn't match up with the 'physics' floor.
- More ~dreams~, "we're not animating for a game, we're animating for a universe".

- Honestly I can't write much more about this, it was kind of interesting from a technical perspective, I'd imagine, but none of this is anything that hasn't been seen before.
- Crowd was unenthused to begin with but seemed to get more into it near the end.

MilesK posted:

Live ATV is boring. Where's Sandi and Ben to liven things up with fake banter and bad jokes?

Milky Moor posted:

i can't believe how loving boring this is

"this is how we made a dude walk around on uneven surfaces"

"this is how we render a screenshot"

Beet Wagon posted:

CIG teamed up with a lovely cellphone weather radar app to let people see moons lmao

Latin Pheonix posted:

Beyond the Cutting Edge Presentation Summary

- More seats filled this time.
- Brian still looks/sounds like a broken shell of a man.
- They showed one snapshot, then showed how each graphical effect was layered in.
- They then went on to explain how they added each individual graphical effect, one by one.
- How texturing works 101.
- Discord: "this is literally just how a video card works".
- Mipmapping! Bloom! It's like a journey into the graphics card development!
- All the graphical updates they added to 3.0 (basically the slide says what is in the schedule update).
- Very brief mention of networking updates (no details) before quickly moving on to day/night cycles.
- "Look at all the shiny effects we've added!"
- Short-term plans: literally all the stuff they mentioned in their schedule.
- They plan on using multithreading in the future.
- Long-term plans: again, basically what they say in the schedule.

Q&A highlights:
- Backers: "No question, but thank you for your work!"
- Q: "With Render To Texture, is it possible to have a second bridge?" A: "Depends what you mean by possible"
- Q: "Can you make mirrors that aren't fake?"


- This was seriously painful to watch/summarise, so I've probably missed a fair bit here.

Goredema posted:

I love that this entire Xi'an talk is about "exploring ideas", and not actual game-play.

"What do they eat?"
"What do they wear?"
"How do they sleep?"
"No one knows. This isn't final. We're just exploring ideas."

Star Citizen: Exploring Ideas

EDIT: HOLY poo poo. "We don't want them to look too tribal."

Latin Pheonix posted:

Everyday Close Encounters Presentation Summary

- Brian Chambers' shambling corpse is wheeled onstage again to introduce some people with the most made up job titles ever.
- Now we're dealing with story writing 101.
- They literally spell out Tevarin = Ronin, Vanduul = warriors, Banu = Traders, Xian = Diplomats, Humans = Jack of all trades. Incredibly deep worldcrafting there.
- Talked about individual aesthetics (Xian = verticle ships.buildings).
- Background of the alien species.
- Crowd looks totally disinterested.
- Wikipedia entry of what 'carrion' means. Again, seriously.
- A whole section dealing with Xian language. Thankfully at this point I went to make dinner.

- I had to stop 30 mins in as I had to go eat, but I don't think I missed anything unless someone wants to finish this?

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

This is too loving boring to even mock.

trucutru posted:

Chin posted:

Lazy mashup of Chinese and Japanese

That's too much effort. It's actually 90% Korean.

blueberrysmith posted:

C U in the verse commando

AutismVaccine posted:

Nice 17 fps on an empty plane

Latin Pheonix posted:

The Corporate Colonies of Stanton Presentation Summary

- Joined a bit late so I'm starting this a few minutes in.
- Moons have a 'mood' (cold, dry, etc.)- more incredible development by designers.
- How they designed the 3 moons, as if they haven't been leaning on this topic for the past 6 months.
- MORE info that, again any fool could see from a cursory glance: Yela and Cellin have mountains outwards, Daymar is valleys cut into the planet.
- How the planets were crafted.
- Space Baobab trees.
- SO MANY GROUND TEXTURES.
- Ooooh, look at us zoom out of a planet... Again! (Audience clapped here, despite this being a thing they've been doing for over a year now).
- Concept art!
- That is all...
- ... or is it?
- Weather app! .
- All it does is just give you a 3d view of each planet.
- Dude's crazy swole though.

- Again more of a whole load of nothing new. These are all shows that could've been ATVs.

Erenthal posted:

yeah gamescom was non-stop funny

this is the equivalent of the bataan death march in comparison

Beet Wagon posted:

wait wait wait did they really try to present a picture of Enceladus as their own work?

ewe2 posted:

So after almost six hours of this complete bullshit, here's some things I'm taking away:

* They sell a contradictory message. You'll explore planets alone and claim them. And at the same time, you'll have to claim land (with a BEACON) on a planet you have to share with others. Contradictory messages like these are get-outs, the citizens will only hear the positive message and ignore or discount the negative. They'll trumpet the space-to-assets zoom in on a planet and discuss how labour-intensive the work is. And then tell you there's hundreds of planets out there to explore.

* All the partnerships are marriages of convenience. A useless app for weather on imaginary planets. An over-expensive SSD from a hardware company trying to get into the SSD market is the only way you can get another imaginary ship.

* moisture farming.

* really really obvious discussions of game tech problems that have already been solved with other engines. To the point I'm actually wondering are they trying to "white room reverse-engineer" unity or unreal engines, because that's what it looks like. They would discuss these in excruciating detail in the powerpoint presentations/panels, and then discuss them AGAIN in interviews with Lando afterwards.

* mutant chinese spaceship turtles.

* Getting citizens to vote on the top 10 broadcast moments. All of which were terrible.

There's more but my brain is trying to stave off the horror long enough to make it to the WAVY HANDSES keynote address.

Latin Pheonix posted:

Pioneering the Future Presentation Summary

- Canned presentation by Not Elon Musk about the development of technology in SC's universe.
- Pioneer introduced, when seen in motion it looks like an even bigger Homeworld ship rip-off.
- Brian zombie update: still a zombie.
- Tony Zurovec makes an appearance after being stored underground for a year by CIG.
- Show is about how the planetary landing mechanics will take place.
- "This is for Orgs or a single player"
- Stats that will almost certainly change.
- Built for 4-8 players (or one player and 3-7 AI).
- Limited amount (1,000), unless cash-buys are unlimited?
- Tony Z explains how mechanics work: You can buy plots of land to build on!
- More mechanics; they might as well be arguing over what colour unicorn they want, given how far out this mechanic is.
- How they plan on having players build outposts.
- Plenty of concept art 'ideas'.
- Moisture farming!

Q&A:
-Can I land my dream chariot on it?

- Yeah it was all just a ship sale. I'm not going to do a summary for the keynote since most people will likely be watching it and it'll be on Youtube.

Forgot to mention moisture farming.

thatguy posted:

Intermission from the stream while they download the build.

Quavers posted:

Quarterly releases, called "Beyond", where have I seen that before?

AlternateAccount posted:

Uhhh steam and neon and big buildings apparently = BLADE RUNNER now -_-

skaboomizzy posted:

They made the Moon city from Borderlands The Presequel

Awesome job

Boxturret posted:

he literally called it coruscant

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Why are there no other ships in this PLANET MADE OUT OF A CITY?

Sindai posted:

a corporate HQ shaped like a giant pyramid, what will they think of next

Enchanted Hat posted:

Hahaha, are you kidding? They did NOTHING on either planet!

Beet Wagon posted:

lol there's already a couple citizens smugposting about procedural cities on the refunds subreddit. Thanks for the fuel, CIG.

Dark Off posted:

ship is floating off the ground


i cant even tell if that thing is a guard or monster


oh dear me these guys have no faces

Solarin posted:

Whoever did gamescom 2016 and then the sandworm one definitely did this one too. Things have a very different feel when they have nothing to do with the janked to gently caress nightmare that is cig's actual product.

Chris seemed more than ever to be spouting complete blatant bullshit. Like saying 'it's all real' about the city and the poo poo about waves and just everything. He was in full dream selling mode and has to know his ability to harvest whale blood is gonna take a blow when people understand that 3.0 is the loving mvp and the fantasy finally comes into contact reality: the money is gone and this disastrously performing tech demo is the game

thatguy posted:

If you're new to this whole thing you might be missing out on a large portion of comedy. You see, Chris did a presentation on ArcCorp (the procedural/hand-crafted city/moon/planet from yesterday's presentation) back in 2014.
Here's what it looked like then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiVODuGFCMg&t=5950s

Golli posted:

That to me is the worst thing about this performance art piece - particularly if actually they wanted it to ultimately be a playable MMO. Over the years I have played a few MMO's, and the prerendered demo yesterday contained all of the timesink travel problems that ultimately led to abandonment from boredom.

Walking around from point A to point B with no waypoints or objectives available and visible (particularly for a new player).

Vanilla WOW was my first MMO. Saw a video of an early Onyxia kill and decided to give it a try. Valley of Trials went OK, then when they kicked me out, I wandered blindly out of the Valley and immediately took a hard right, wound up on the other side of the river in the Barrens - and got repeatedly owned by level 13 giraffes.

After about 20 hours and many deaths, and talking to a guy at work who showed me the Onyxia video, I found out about mounts. So I toughed it out. Over the years, WOW has improved the travel experience - realizing that doing stuff at Point A or Point B is more fun to more people that getting between the two points.

Complicated mount summoning rituals -

SWTOR is a good example of this. The first time you go to your instanced hangar and get in your ship, walk around, 'talk' to your crew, travel (instantly) to your destination, then go through destination starport hangar, the starport, find a taxi stand and go to your next quest-giver was cool. The 12000th time was tedious. But at least travel between planets was fast.

Slow travel in space -

EVE is a good example of this. Even barring null, and low-sec travel, which is hard by design. It takes forever to get to someplace to (maybe) do something interesting. I did Red Frog freight hauling for a stretch, which was a fairly safe way to build up what at the time I felt was a lot of spacebux. But there was one system that took two or three minutes (maybe it was more but I don't want to exaggerate. It felt like forever) in warp to get from one gate to another - and I soon learned to pass on any contract available that included that system.


And these are all things that Chris seems to emphasize as the COOL PARTS of a potential MMO.

Hard pass. Thanks.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

One of the nice things about Star Citizen at this point is that things have pretty much calcified into their existing properties. Nobody here is magically going to be impressed and decide that, indeed, Star Citizen is good and will impress the world. Similarly nobody on the other side is going to see that and magically go "wow, they didn't show any gameplay" and decide to get a refund. People will see what they want to see, especially given how good Chris is at providing just enough rope for people to hang themselves on their own dreams. What I saw was a lot of really impressive work for a game that nobody actually paid for. I see planets that would look fantastic as flyovers during a cutscene, art assets that would be really great in localized encounters, and plenty of generic (but still nice) content. If CIG had maintained the original concept of instances linked by cutscenes, or if it was for a single player Squadron 42, then I'd be pretty impressed. But since the content they revealed has minimal impact on the expected gameplay, they steadfastly failed to show any kind of multiplayer interaction (or any real gameplay to speak of), and since Star Citizen is supposed to be a MMO and not a single player game there isn't much to be excited about.

What I saw was basically yet another indication of the things that actually matter to Chris Roberts; grandeur, scale, and derivative content. Look at how many times he talked about things that sound impressive like all those NPCs, the size of various buildings, provided a reference to a superior work of fiction like Blade Runner or Star Wars. Look at how little he talked about gameplay loops, or introduced mechanics that players have been waiting years for, or addressed core issues like networking, performance, or the flight model. Look at how a game that was meant to be a space simulation barely even touched space; indeed the only relevant discussion regarding actual space travel was how Chris apparently thinks that waiting eight minutes to travel between planets is somehow good game design. Look at how he thinks that showing hundreds of "procedurally generated" city blocks will somehow enhance the player experience, or how having millions of square kilometers of empty territory will lead to a better experience than what you can already get with Elite.

Star Citizen is not a scam, it's an ego trip. It's hundreds of people working on something, and doing what looks to be some good work doing it, to stoke the narcissism of a failed developer who is more interested in maintaining the appearances of producing a AAA title than actually delivering it. What we saw today was absolutely an indication that they are burning millions and using up a lot of personnel, and they are delivering on things. The problem is that what they're delivering has no bearing on what people are paying for.

cuntman.net posted:

this is still really long

SCtrumpHaters posted:

So I've been a long time lurker but had to grit my teeth and pay up just to explain....well gloat on all you clowns,

Like how does it taste? The biggest event of the year where you guys were sourly clenching your fingers in anticipation of mocking something better than yourselves.

But Chris delivered. Showing Dereek Farts and you idiots what is possible in gaming.

You guys are pretty much silent, trying anything in your power to smear this accomplishment and its ugly. You have nothing solid to point at and say this is bad. Its all supposition and honestly, lies.

See you in the loving Verse friends.

D_Smart posted:

So I finished reading this thread that popped up over the weekend. The OSC posts in there, are going to be a serious conundrum for those Shitizens who keep claiming that I'm him.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/comments/7967hf/star_citizen_tax_credit_fraud_the_saga_continues/

D_Smart posted:

I am in an OpenHouse stream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM3JlO45thE

nopantsjack posted:

Me and the missus watched citizencon last night and it was a pretty good laugh, extremely dull but footage of SC always is.

I liked when Sandi came on at the start to be like "just so you know, we weren't late, but then we had to start later than planned", that got a good laugh from us.
also when they had to open it with a real life popup ad from intel my favourite bit was when the intel guy was like "so chris, what can this partnership do for you?" expecting a short snappy "it'll make the game better!" before he could continue his marketing speil, but croberts just rambles for like 10 straight minutes making poo poo up off the top of his head like a kid improvising an essay because Croberts knows nothing about modern tech or how the game is being made and brings everything to a screeching halt.

also it all sorta ended in them making no mans sky but with buildings and i laughed so hard when i realised they had to cut away from a 10 MINUTE ftl jump that my throat still hurts today

the whole city thing though with like millions of simulated NPCs lmao why? why would you ever do that???
it really is just talented kids making proofs of concepts of insanely impractical extravagances to scam money off of whales to fluff crobert's ego

G0RF posted:

The only thing I laughed out loud at was Chris’s string of “no other game can do this” type backpats. Big talk from a guy whose actual game still doesn’t let players land on planets nearly two years after “Pupil to Planet” and celebrated it’s 4th anniversary of not being able to add female player characters to the game back in the spring...

Beet Wagon posted:

The thing about the procedural cities deal is that yes it does look cool, but they've implemented it in a way that doesn't make the game better. You can't go walk around any of them. You can fly through them and land at your little designated landing point on the outskirts, but the ability to fly through them actually highlights the fact that they're not real - it makes the divide between "real" (places you can walk around) and "fake" way way more obvious than if they did something like making it so you couldn't free-fly in the airspace around cities, and locking you to your little landing zone. I don't think anybody at CIG realizes it yet (and I know none of the fans do) but what they've done is to take the old problem of a player looking at something on the skybox and thinking "man how come I can't go there" and magnified it a thousand times. That feeling that you get when you land in a station in Elite and wish you could go drive around in one of the little trucks is going to be nothing compared to the first time Star Citizen slaps you with how fake the city is.

Sean Tracy posted:

Not interiors in every building scattered across the EcoSystems
Hey guys,

For the sake of clarity (and my own sanity) really want to clarify something from our tools presentation in the keynote at citizen con.

Those specific tools have progressed like this.

1. Outposts (procedural assistance to make tons of them) already in 3.0.0
2. Truckstops aka: small space stations (now filling those out the same way we do outposts). Beyond 3.0.0
3. Landing Zone areas, further beyond 3.0.0

Basically yes we can create interiors very quickly and relatively easily but there is not much gained from filling ALL of the buildings in the whole planet and it'd make very little sense to do! We'd need SO many variations to avoid art fatigue (see the same casaba type outlet in every commercial center etc..)

We will absolutely fill out landing zones using tools like this but yeah but please don't expect a planet filled with buildings to be completely filled also with interiors. Hell planet earth isn't covered with buildings every square meter and even if you spent your whole life going into every single building on earth you wouldn't have enough time in your life to cover all of them!

Might we spawn a room in a building somewhere to do a mission or to meet a specific character or get a specific object...perhaps, but not every single building.

My apologies if my wording caused any confusion! I really don't want you guys to have that impression.
There is no intention at this time to fill every single building scattered across the ecosystems with interiors, some perhaps and some might even be spawned but absolutely not every single one of them!

We were all very happy with the event and can't thank you guys enough for the support and hope that you guys enjoyed it as much as we had making and showing it to you.

Fun. Times. Ahead.

-Sean "Criminal" Tracy

Mr.Tophat posted:

Sean "Criminal" Tracy eh? Think you've got the order wrong there mate.

BeefThief posted:

If chris fired everybody now and just kept pocketing all the money himself he could probably make it to citizencon of next year before the backers would ever know

no_recall posted:

WTF is up with the Pioneer commercial? Why so lo-fi? They show off mocap poo poo again?

Honestly that was brutally boring. I can't imagine not being able to skip during ShitCon.

POI's in Elite are already a pain in the rear end to navigate. How the hell are these "pioneer stations" going to show up on navigation? I was part of a team that went barnacle hunting and we had to use our eyes and fly between 6KM and 30KM above the planet to look for these POI's before FD did anything about them, does SC have some sort of auto navigation / POI system available? If there are 300 of these things on a said system how would it look like? Would you HUD be dotted (pun intended) with all these pioneer outposts for you to trade in? How would you know what faction / alignment they're from? What would you find when you land or how would you know what they're selling / buying / trading / whatever?


This game is stuff of dreams.

Buy a Pioneer Today!

boviscopophobic posted:

reddit posted:

: How long will it take for people to realize that CIG demos are just concepts and have nothing to do with what's actually completed and working?
: Adorable, the CitCon 2017 demo is exactly what their builds are capable of and working using in-game assets. In essence, their concepts made virtually "real". Did you think that was a Maya rendered cutscene? And, as a non-backer, your uninformed POV on SC and SQ42 don't actually matter.
: About as real as the sand worm or their other countless demos. And it's not like your opinion matters either, so not sure what that was about.

Ghostlight posted:

Hello, I'm back.

I watched the 1 hour trimmed stream of Nothing But The Steak that CIG put up on Twitch, and here are my thoughts:


1. the 'game' as presented looks nice. The city looks great, and there's a good number of NPCs wandering about or standing on chairs as dictated by their incredible AI that for some reason the further out the 'player' gets from the centre of the station the more it seems to choose just standing in one place occupying space almost as if all of the animations are hand-crafted and they ran out of time.
2. Honestly, the city looks great when he's on foot. Especially helpful is that the stamina system is disabled within it so you can sprint from one end to the other without having a heart attack. It's single-player RPG-level quality in terms of visuals.
3. Their interaction system is still poo poo and unintuitive where you have to know what's interactable before you can focus on it to get interactions. This is seriously awful and I have no idea how people haven't made a fuss about having to 'look' at some random button on your spaceship to get an Engine On option that also allows you to turn the Engine Off when it already is.
4. Flying slowly around buildings making it painfully obvious there is no code to handle collisions with them.
5. Surface of the planet looks nice.
6. Time to travel for EIGHT loving MINUTES!?!? Who the gently caress designed this, and Chris says it will actually take EVEN LONGER to get to a quest destination in the real game. Lmao, and they make fun of Elite for not having content.

7. Break time for tools discussion. This where poo poo gets real.
8. The planet-spanning city is procedurally generated because otherwise it would be completely impossible to physically do - however, the tool they present is painfully labour-intensive in terms of putting down height maps and dictating zones and stuff. Why would you need this tool if it's procedural? You wouldn't, it would be a list of rules about how buildings clump and how landing zones are spaced and what they contain. They demonstrate 'reseeding' a neighbourhood outside of whatever Blade Runner City is called - why are the neighbourhoods generated on a different seed? The whole planet should be one seed that dictates everything. They are 'procedurally' populating the planet with manually created content. That is buttfucking insane, and explains why previous planets were obviously copy-and-paste tiles. Visually it's more excusable when it's man-made objects that could be standardised like buildings, but the previous crater repetition makes it obvious this is how they're doing their generation.
9. They don't mention how the interior tool is connected to the building assets at all, so I'm entirely convinced it can create impossible spaces. They have probably worked around this by giving it a smaller footprint than any of their possible buildings, or making buildings just massive squares at the street level. It's nothing amazing, but watching it manually place pipe assets and poo poo during generation is insane. Again, hugely manual labour intensive despite being sold as a time saver it is just a basic level editor with automated decoration placement.
10. I forget the other tool they showed but it had the same issues of not actually saving any labour costs above having basic tools for designing a game. Certainly not on the level that you need to generate planet-wide amounts of content.

11. Talking about placing more landing zones and populating them. The whole planet is uninteractable window-dressing outside of these landing zones, so no talk about how they're going to restrict people to the zones they have manually created to interact with. No reason to go to other zones because all of them will have the same basic content just shuffled a little more.

12. Wow we're on another planet that's largely the same as all the other planets we've seen down to using the same smoggy smokestacks we just saw on Coruscan't. Apparently this is a planet where there's no federal oversight so there's some wildlife here that drifts around and eats garbage. I have named them Citizens.

cool new Polack jokes posted:

I can’t do this anymore





gently caress these people

They even archered the goddamn box in another pic

Dark Off posted:

cr explaining about realistic simulation of gravity. and how its "weaker" 25km up
Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGcG0g7GsOI&t=1677s

Combat Theory posted:

Thoatse posted:

Wait what are you really going [to CitizenCon]?

Yes and I indeed just returned from my trip there.

After catching up with the thread again I see some of the pictures I took did entertain the thread quite a bit

I'm sorry I can't update too much on my personal con of the citizens experience (which was fabulous) here without doxxing myself hardcore. I will say however that I disagree with beers assessment that cig calmed the woes of the citizens enough to keep it up for the foreseeable future, after watching the reactions of the people there. "where the gently caress is the gameplay" has been tossed around like a greeting sentence.

The only female I saw was a hooker

E: I wasn't the only goon there by the way

Sunswipe posted:

Spiderdrake posted:

Combat Theory posted:

The only female I saw was a hooker

Seriously did someone tip her off to the fact she could make thousands selling jpegs of her space ships and promising to blow their minds later

Cloud Imperium Brothels: We're working on the most amazing blowjob ever! Just $500, delivery SOON.
*3 years later*
Buyer: Uh, I bought the blowjob three years ago. Now I've been sent a jpeg of a dog's testicle. WTF?
CIB: One of our whores changed it during development and they've since left the company. No refunds!

D_Smart posted:

Tippis posted:

AP posted:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/924020485695746048

Can somebody link me to the time in the stream when this happened? (The media player bit)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnvtgQiaOJ4&t=2335s roughly 39 minutes in — look for the WMP controls at the bottom of the stream feed.
Now, as much as I agree that it wouldn't make sense to show that live, there's still the point that 1) don't show the media controls during a presentation, and 2) citizens will point to that demo and dribble “see, it's all in the game already”.

XK posted:

AP posted:

https://twitter.com/D4RK_4NG3L/status/924815031572877312
Tweet Summary
GPU: GeForce GTX 980 Ti
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
RAM: 32GB
Resolution: 1920x1080
AVG FPS: 18

The loading screen and menu have great FPS.

Toops posted:

Very good article by Polygon. Plenty of facts with a nicely obfuscated skepticism:

Star Citizen’s fan convention introduced a planet-sized city right out of Blade Runner: “This is pretty much Coruscant”

quote:

"The surface of Arc Corporation, while interesting, isn’t intended for players to interact with in-game. In the future, Roberts said, Arc Corporation may include more than one location where players can land their ships and engage with vendors and quest givers in a fixed, social hub with other players. But, for now, the goal is to design an interesting landscape and nothing more.

The demo included no combat, no quests and no traditional, linear narrative of any kind. It was effectively a demonstration of environmental storytelling."

quote:

"The 3.0 version of the project’s PU is currently in an advanced testing stage, and is expected to be in the hands of backers imminently, though no release date has been given.

After the 3.0 update, Roberts said his team would be focusing on “date-driven, not feature or content-driven” updates in order to give the community a “more regular experience.” Neither the Squadron 42 single-player game nor the Star Citizen PU have a release date of any kind."

Mr Fronts posted:

No, I reckon most "potential" backers who worked in the financial systems industry heard Roberts' idiotic initial project plan, sized it up as bullshit right away, and steered clear. I mean, that sales pitch. Multiple teams/contractors developing modules in parallel, then slotting them together to make an integrated product? Sure, there are established ways to do that - it's a pretty commonplace project approach, after all.

But they hosed it up right at the start. Star Citizen was easy to classify as doomed/hosed/development-hell/comedy-fail/textbook-how-not-to-do-it. CIG broke the most basic rule, right from the get-go...

DO:
- Write a detailed functional spec for each module, and for the interactions between each module.

DONT:
- Let any team start coding their module until the functional specs are done.


CIG didn't go away into squirrel mode, into back rooms, planning their poo poo, nailing down their project. They didn't speak once on the boring but vital work being done, hammering together boring docs. No, they were OFF AND RUNNING, developing! So exciting! So marketable! So impossible to build into one cohesive product without proper advance planning!


Note: We're talking 2012/2013 here. At the time, CIG's end product pretty much involved a pilot-focused spaceflight module, a "landing zone FPS" module and a "boarding FPS" module". It was abundantly clear then that those modules wouldn't come together if they were going to be cowboys about doing it seat-of-the-pants.

True to form, they went off the rails, making the spaceflight module suddenly involving non-pilot focused gameplay - passenger, flight attendant, crew member doing turrets, repairs. Huge spec change, on-the-fly.

Even back then, it wasn't like CIG was trying to get a 100% free-walk spaceflight environment seamlessly integrated with atmospheric reentry, planetary landings, exploring on foot and in wheeled/hovering vehicles, orbital mechanics and day/night cycles.


How much poo poo has this company written and then discarded, all because they had (have) no development documentation discipline?

trucutru posted:

ManofManyAliases posted:

Comparatively, communication still remains more open and public than pretty much any other title I've seen - and I'm glad of it.

Thank you about not gloating (lol, how could you?) but you must be making GBS threads us with that sentence, right? Like, do a direct comparison between citcon and, dunno, every other loving video game conference? Compare it directly to the Frontier one. The dates announced, the detailed development charts, the explanation behind design decisions, the showcase of gameplay? That's also open and public, but more importantly informative in a way that SC's vague promises are not.

SC may be very open and public, but it's open and public in the same way an encrypted message posted on a forum is. Everybody can read the gibberish but no info can be extracted from it.

Danknificent posted:

i've been following since 2015, lot of people saying time will tell about various things

major spoiler time has told

it's the end of 2017, there's no game and no reason to expect a game anytime soon

there's no argument to be had here

it's not a game that's overdue at this point; forget the years of shenanigans and just looking at the 3.0 timeline - you have, not a game, but a slice of a pre-alpha literally a year overdue on top of six billion other delays

this is it; this is all the evidence anyone should need. if the restaurant can't even do the chips and salsa right how the gently caress they gonna bring you the best drat fajitas ever?

you spend several years waiting for the chips and salsa you know drat well you ain't getting those fajitas no matter how much you paid for them

PederP posted:

Running game servers for a non-turn based game on cloud services designed for web services and sites is not feasible. Especially not for an MMO or a shooter/space sim. While getting the servers hosted and (physically) maintained by a third party is a great idea, you do not want them running in someone else's infrastructure. You want full control down of the servers and the network infrastructure.

Game servers in the cloud are a cost-cutting measure, with a significant impact on stability and performance. It is not an advantage.


The cloud is still struggling to be viable for many enterprise-level business systems. Various cloud vendors are trying hard to get their foot into the financial industry, and fighting for every inch. MMO servers are more complicated to develop and maintain than anything in the financial industry. Amazon may be able to provide a solution for lumberyard match-based games with straightforward requirements - but I am beyond skeptical they can provide anything useful for an MMO. The notion that they would be able provide something which is better than a bespoke, self-managed solution is ludicrous.

Using Amazon will *add* complexity to the already herculean task it is to keep an MMO running. The ability to "spin up servers as needed" is vastly overrated, and plain websites regularly struggle to scale properly in the cloud. You can't "spin up" your way out of the bottlenecks which are typically the issue when player activity peaks and stuff starts breaking - there are always subsystems which can't simple scale by adding more instances on more hardware. It's cutting costs at the expense of a worse product and a lovely time for the engineers. So it will be popular, and it will make games bad.

trucutru posted:

Amazon is trying to get into the game development business so they are definitely going to offer servers that work well with their lumberyard engine. Of course, for most games, the virtual machines do not have to talk to each other as each one only cares about their own game instances. The clusterfuck arising from having multiple interdependent servers running on virtual machines, handling a MMO with FPS requirements (of all things) is gonna be, as the good doctor would say, glorious.

thatguy posted:

All of these silly "bandwidth" and "speed" questions will be solved with Telepathy 2.0 so maybe you guys just need to wait and see.

EmesiS posted:

ManofManyAliases posted:

Yeah. AWS servers are comprised of 10 u chassis, 16 blades per chassis (4 in a rack), total of 64 blades per rack. At 1 server a blade, that's essentially 64 servers per rack, give or take how they are managing their virtual machines.

STOP TALKING!

XK posted:

I'm sad I wasn't here for MoMA's AWS posting, because those are some really good posts to make fun of somebody for fundamentally misunderstanding how a technology works.

How many units of rack space does AWS give me when it spins up servers? Wooo

D_Smart posted:

ManofManyAliases posted:

How much bandwidth per client do you suppose is actually necessary if we're talking about refined serialized variables that now only transmit the deltas for each client instead of whole models like in the past (40-60 mb per ship down to less than 4-5mb)? Or, with zoning that was described as only exhibiting the physics, models, variables, etc for a particular zone in a particular instance as the client travels through? Are you saying that Amazon compute is incapable or that the requirements are so outlandish that it's not possible?

That's a load of bollocks. And as I'm on mobile, I don't have time to write up a 1000 character word salad to educate on it.

This is the thing with you guys. You read poo poo from CIG, either don't understand it, or use their bullshit explanation for it. Then go utter it with the most proud proclamation.

D_Smart posted:

monkeytek posted:

Agreed, I don't see AWS as a viable option for this sort of a deployment. Taking into account that this will be one of the most resource intense MMO's to ever be released I can't see it being operable on anything less that a specifically architected hardware solution. There are a very small number of hosting companies that can bring this to fruition and the costs are going to be huge for start up and maintenance of this game.

With the design costs for this game as large as they must be there is no room for the hardware solution.

Correct. And that's where they screwed up. All they had to do was implement private servers and matchmaking, right off the bat. They could have made available to backers the same console server they are running. With that, backers could run and host their own loving servers without ANY costs to CIG.

Then, like what ED did, they could use AWS for transaction, database, and master server (for the matchmaking) stuff on the backend.

But had they done that, they won't be selling an MMO. They'd be selling a session based game with a cap of about 32 clients. And then all those JPEGs they've been selling under the guise of building an MMO, would never have been sold. And they probably would never gotten past $65M. Let alone to $163M.

They made their bed. And they're going to get kicked out of it because croberts is a loving, incompetent moron.

TheAgent posted:

they are going through $50m a year, easy

like a single studio in the UK is burning through half that in a year and its documented and online and you can view that poo poo with your own eyeballs

trucutru posted:

Four years ago, backers knew (well, they thought they knew) the release date of SQ42, the overall scope of SC, and had a general idea of the gameplay involving professions.

Today, after thousands of days of development, they don't know anything for sure about those points, besides the fact that the game will be the best ever and has the most open development.

Virtual Captain posted:

JLee is a concept artist or something for CIG and is understandably obsessed with every tree in the forest.

https://go.twitch.tv/videos/185872800?t=55m35s 55m35s
JLee: 'Wait what did you say Chris?'
Chris: "[ArcCorp] was a small level and everything outside of it was, sort of uh, y-know kind-of, distan- it was basically faked"
JLee: "Yes, this is true."

https://go.twitch.tv/videos/185872800?t=1h3m25s 1h3m25s
Chris: 'We might not let players fly this close'
JLee: 'I understand why Chris would say this, we might not want players to get too close to the population. I would rather not lock players into certain areas, maybe security drones stop you if you fly too close or blow you up. I dunno how we're going to do it. I think we're kind torn with making that decision.'

https://go.twitch.tv/videos/185872800?t=1h11m 1h11m
JLee: 'Are we going to get 500v500 player battles with good fps? I'm not on netcode. The theory breakdown is to have massive battles. Currently, we do not have that. We wanna have players on different instances but still see each other. I dunno how it works.'

https://go.twitch.tv/videos/185872800?t=1h34m50s 1h34m50s
JLee: 'Let me show you. See these screens? An artist has to come in an fill in what shows on those screens. So we can't just generate an entire level.'
https://go.twitch.tv/videos/185872800?t=1h36m50s 1h36m50s
JLee: 'Will stock and stores will be automatically filled with economy system as well as the type of items will be sold in each area? Ummm.. Uhh.. That's more of a Tony Z question. From what I know, it won't be automatic.'

XK posted:

I had children to be my spaceship crew, but the game's been delayed so long they've all gone off to college. My main turret gunner finished packing up all his belongings, mocked my Consolidated Outland Pioneer to my face, then said, "gently caress you dad.", before driving away.

Anyone want to join my org?

VictorianQueerLit posted:

This is Star Citizen. Literally anything you can imagine will be possible. Lifetimes worth of gameplay for anyone doing anything they could want.

Want to mine procedural asteroids like a 4k minecraft? Want to fly on the frontlines against the VAHNDOOHL? Want to haul rocks other people mine? Want to run a space refinery intricately breaking down every rock into it's constituent components? Want to be a space news anchor always traveling to the newest story? Want to be a space cruise liner employee mixing drinks? Want to be a space farmer or space particle accelerator....ist? Want to do space search and rescue? Want to haul physical information around?

The first thing you do is ignore how actual games work and what is actually possible and then everything is possible.

None of these things will just be a shallow minigame mechanic where you just hit a button, and will instead be lifetimes worth of gameplay. You are stupid for not building a sim pit. By the time you realize "Space News Van" comes with such intricate and in-depth mechanics that you start building your own sim pit to live your new life in the Verse this guy will be on his 3rd or 4th revision and be living comfortably in his new life where he is finally happy and doesn't have to worry about bills or responsibility gently caress YOU MOM I PAY RENT IT'S MY ROOM I CAN BUILD WHAT I WANT I'M A SPACE STEWARDESS

D_Smart posted:

fritzgryphon posted:

Dark Off posted:

check out the scale of that ship. Everything is scaled down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGcG0g7GsOI&t=1368s

Took a moment to realize that the other spaceship passes between the camera and the smoke trail effect.

The Aurora is 8m wide so the ship would have to be less than a meter wide. This might also be a draw order problem, because the small ship -seems- to be further away than that?

The ship passing between the cam and effect is draw order problem.

The ship in the foreground being large in comparison to the one passing underneath is due to the view frustum camera zoom on the foreground ship.

The ships appear to be at scale.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Dementropy posted:

Oh yeah Chris totally refuted that like years ago haha wow I cant believe goons are so behind the times welp anyways I dont have a source so dont even bother trying to argue against me have you seen the new ATV pretty cool huh alright time to go byeeeeee

tooterfish posted:

VictorianQueerLit posted:

I think the best part of the Star Citizen Scam finally collapsing is that a large number of nerds will stop psychotically obsessing over Elite Dangerous being THE ENEMY and instead maybe shut up and enjoy the game that delivers on many of Chris Roberts promises.

I'm sure there will always be people that refuse to play it because it dared to exist opposite of Star Citizen and ten years from now at any mention of Elite Dangerous they will scoff and go into a rage filled tirade about "Polygon Tacos" or whatever but I think that will be a small minority.

ED might see a nice boost once thousands of people stop saving themselves for space marriage.

I dunno I'm optimistic at heart so it would be nice to see all the millions of dollars and thousands of players go toward an actual company with a proven product they continue to develop instead of a stammering idiot with a modded Crysis map promising the literal matrix to fools.

It's the fanboy paradox.

They need Elite to exist so they can gloat at how much better Star Citizen is. But the fact that Elite is objectively the better one at the moment (by virtue of being real) is currently driving them loving insane. I can't imagine what they'd be like once you took the possibility of Star Citizen ever existing away from them, because that's basically their only lifeline to sanity.

peter gabriel posted:

Daztek posted:

peter gabriel posted:

Daztek posted:

https://giant.gfycat.com/WeeklyAlertAntarcticfurseal.mp4

alf_pogs posted:

it is loving hilarious that someone was chucking out god drat hard drives at a conference like the world's dorkiest ever hype man

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/CliffordakaMiku/status/925016817453731840

Tweet Summary:
Clifford aka Miku buys two of the new $800+ JPEGs because he is sane and normal.

Experimental Skin posted:

Latin Pheonix posted:

Pledges, please.

Abuminable posted:

AP posted:

https://go.twitch.tv/videos/186834596?t=14m08s
Video Summary:
WTFo's friend camps out in good wifi to buy latest JPEG by melting ships and misses most of the Citcon keynote

This is loltastic. Panic swapping of jpegs for other jpegs since jpegs are limited and the latest jpeg incarnation fulfills all sperg dreams in a singular jpeg. The Pioneer is the jpegularity.

AbstractNapper posted:

AP posted:

https://go.twitch.tv/videos/186834596?t=25m32s
Video Summary:
WTFo's guest explains how water was 5€ at Citcon (but you get 1€ back if you return the cup)

Amazing. Only the best treatment for their devoted supporters.

Truga posted:

The funny thing about 8 minutes is, I'm a proponent of long travel times in online open world games, it's good for the non-combat part of economy play (trading with places far away from main hubs gets profitable since it takes a tiny bit of effort so most won't bother), but obviously star citizen did it all wrong.

On how to do this poo poo right, look at Freelancer. It's a bad game on many levels, but anywhere on your journey, you're hitting content. You see police patrols ganking you for cardamine, you see pirates interrupting the trade lane and scanning you for valuables, you see patrols fighting pirates, avoiding space rocks in space fog nebula, there's constantly *something* happening around your ship.

On the other hand, in star citizen it's just 8 minutes of loving nothing. There's not even awesome nebula scenery or anything, it's just nothing.

Dark Off posted:

relay is starting to turn into somekind of absurd art.

talks about things coming next year sighs and starts talking about how citcon was best stream ever.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/185597571?t=02m59s

talks about tech shown being impossible. Then starts talking how CIG showed that its possible
https://go.twitch.tv/videos/185597571?t=06m36s

"it doesnt matter what reality is . it matters what it looks like" its amazing quote taken out of context and it fits star citizen like a glove.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/185597571?t=23m26s

showing actual gameplay is bad
https://go.twitch.tv/videos/185597571?t=29m54s

Goobs posted:

Rad Russian posted:

Goobs posted:

Adult men crying over a non-existent video game.

I'm not sure what community they're talking about? All I've seen are fanboys arguing with fanboys about what's going to be in their imaginary game and talking non-stop about Derek Smart. Is there some niche, non-toxic sector of the SC community that I'm missing?

fritzgryphon posted:

Topical GDC vid

"We did final art for all our spaceships... ended up throwing it all away."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTtr45y7P0&t=746s

SCtrumpHaters posted:

The biggest one I noticed that CIG is often guilty of is "dont use real world limitations to excuse bad game design". Especially because they are so arbitrary about it. Like one second its all gravity goo and the next its 'well each thruster needs to impart force thats why it flys like poo poo nothing to be done"

9:20 "If someone comes in pitching 1000 person firefights then alarm bells go off"

Although the presenter does show a shocking lack of game dev knowledge "Don't prototype your character opening doors. Thats easy stuff any team can do. I want to see the things that are unique and interesting that define your game"

hot balls man no homo posted:

22 and 23 as well. Don't go thinking you're going to have the success of WoW. Don't be a complete pain in the rear end to work with. Don't go trashing other publishers, don't jam in the latest fad (VR), know your scope and budget. Wow, this guy knows about game design.

This is really a proclick for anyone who knows anything about Star Citizen.

Virtual Captain posted:

#9 - You Never Mentioned Your Glaring Obvious Tech Risk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTtr45y7P0&t=535s (8:55)
"A lot of times if you see a lot of pitches and if you've been working them on the publisher side a lot you kind of know what's feasible and what's not and you know what things are hard to do and what things are easy to do and if somebody comes in and says yeah we want to do a thousand person multiplayer game with real-time firefights then alarm bells go off and it's fine to do something that's really technologically ambitious it's fun to do something that's really dangerous and hard but if you say something like that that sounds dangerous and hard and then you don't explain how you're going to pull that off then that really makes people nervous."


#13 - You Polished Too Early https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTtr45y7P0&t=740s (12:20)
"Part of the reason this image is in here this is from a game I worked on where we did like final art for all the ships before we had our combat modeled down and all the stuff got thrown out and so if a game is really really visually polished but the mechanics are still really broken in prototype that also is an alarm bell because it suggests that the team is not putting all the effort where where it should be and it also suggests that a lot of work is going to be redone. So again if you want to showcase what you're capable of in the art department that's great but make sure that it doesn't overshadow the fact that your your game in the prototype phase may still be really really incomplete. A few still images of show with your art team is capable of is much better than a prototype that is broken in a variety of ways but what that looks amazing because the person you pitching to knows that's all gonna have to be thrown out when the game actually gets nailed down so make sure that work in progress actually looks like work in progress."

no_recall posted:

TLDR : If CR pitched the game to an actual publisher, it would fail on all counts.


That's so good for star citizen.

Citizen posted:

None of this applies to CIG because they are their own publisher. @3000ad_games can't give their games away, that's why it's Indie.

Combat Theory posted:

Sunswipe posted:

It is amazing to consider this when a Citizen mentions how far the game has come. Five years, $160 million, a company that has spread across the globe like a disease and all they have to show for it are videos that (at least to this layman's eye) look much the same as the original pitch videos. Where the gently caress has that money gone? Ok, Porsches, cocaine and playing at movie making. Stupid question. I hope this whole thing does end up in court, because I'd love to see Roberts desperately trying to explain how the 2017 videos are massive advancements from the 2012 pitch videos, and totally took up all that money.

Beet Wagon posted:

AP posted:

https://twitter.com/BoredGamerUK/status/926409113692725248
Tweet Summary:
Exclusive ship sold with Intel SSD doesn't come with LTI, BoredGamerUK petitioning Ben on twitter to add LTI.

drat, they didn't even bother to give the Intel shill-ships LTI? That's some weak poo poo, CIG. People are shelling out $500 for a variant of a ship that originally cost something like $200 and you can't be hosed to give them LTI?

CIG's gone so far into the ship-selling rabbithole that they can't even remember their own rules.

Golli posted:

Dear Newegg:

Please issue an RMA for my Intel OPTANE.

Reason: No LTI on imaginary ship.

Thank You-

BoredGamer, Angry SSD User

Golli posted:

Groundbreaking tech

Chris has made the world's first quantum game!

It exists in two simultaneous states until it is interacted with by the user. The game is both Alpha and Released Already.

Observer notes it is a buggy piece of crap: "It is Alpha. Send more money."
Observer notes it is a buggy piece of crap and they want a refund: "It is released. No refunds."

fritzgryphon posted:

How can they describe these bugs with a completely straight face? Either the coders are super good actors, or they are actually pizza delivery boys that were invited to stay.

"To see if the player has his cursor over an item in the store, we raycast the cursor against all the colliders in the entire universe. This causes a bug where the display case glass blocks the ray and the player can't select the item."

1. You would just raycast the items near the player, not the universe. You're not shooting a bullet.

2. You don't want any level geometry to obstruct the item, anyway. It would make it hard to select an item that is partially obstructed.

3. Why not use a faster and easier selection system? The player has to painstakingly put the cursor right on the item's collider (which will be annoying if the object is small). You could literally just check if the cursor is within X pixels of the item on the screen, X changing with distance and item size. If the test intersects more than 1 item, use the nearer one, or the one that you clicked closer to it's center. User friendly and 1/100th the processing time.

4. Transparent objects would need to be on a separate collision layer anyway for when you code NPC vision AI, among other things. Collider layers isn't an unexpected crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tRStz404qY&t=261s

Toops posted:

The first time I ever designed a system for picking up items, I had a problem. I couldn't pick up items if there was something in front of it. The raycast would hit the something first. Then I did a quick google search, read about object/collider layers, then I read about raycast filtering. I went back to my editor, set all items to the "item" layer, set the raycast so it could only hit objects that were members of the "item" layer. Problem solved in ~10 minutes. I have a terrible memory, and I remember it, so.

Am I supposed to believe CIG, a $160m company with world class game developers don't know how to do this? I don't. I'm not a uniquely bright individual, and I figured it out.

Possible options:
1. Somebody just forgot to set environment object layers properly
2. The item 2.0 "use" raycast wasn't set to filter properly
3. It's a fake bug they invented just for the ATV segment
4. It's incredibly hard to do raycast filtering in CryEngine

Personally, I would be embarrassed sharing this as a "hot take" bug fix. It's either a silly oversight, or reveals shocking ignorance on the part of the CIG devs.

Chris Roberts posted:

I still don’t know what LTI is and I don’t care to know.

Omniblivion posted:

I don't know if this has been linked already, but.... what the actual gently caress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tznbxuUbEwI
Video Summary: 23 min video of Klingon level detailing of Space Lizard language.
Thousands of dollars worth of man hours went into making this stupid rear end video on how to pronounce this made up language in a jpeg simulator

thatguy posted:

That's a video on a multi-million dollar space game's Youtube channel with thousands of views.

trucutru posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tznbxuUbEwI&t=1147s

Ahahahahaha, this is so loving low-effort (and ching-chong racist). It only looks well-done when you have no idea of how this stuff works. (Like everything else in this doomed projec).

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

Tokamak posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report

The schedule report has a new format where they list 'bugs' and 'tasks' for each of the six remaining focus areas.

57 bugs and 254 tasks until PTU

Keep in mind that all of the performance/stability issues are technically tasks, not bugs, and shopping went from 17 to 20 bugs overnight. CIG is dangling a new carrot in front of the backers, and have revealed how much information they have been holding back over the last couple of months. Keep in mind that they often add almost as many bugs as they solve, and that figure could easily end up being 200 bugs and 1000 tasks.

I really wish the "de-bamboozle" guy was still around to explain this.

SCtrumpHaters posted:

So let me start off by saying there is no bigger fan of SC than me. I am literally all in financially, emotionally and spiritually. This game is going to be the best game ever and quite honestly the one true game. That being said I have a slight concern and wonder if I am just being silly. The previous burn downs showed far less bugs/tasks than what we have now. If you sum the current list we are at 291 tasks/bugs. This is drastically higher than before. Like I said I'm not bitching, whining or anything of that nature and I believe in star citizen to the point that I think I might be a zealot.
What do you guys think about the task/bug numbers growing so drastically?

AP posted:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZyk72oFwQo/

Mr. Carlisle posted:

AP posted:

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/926925033322065920

lol why would you tweet this

Whatever intern she's got running her twitter is so good at their job

AP posted:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/926884385944735745

D_Smart posted:

[Citizens] together with CIG, they've created a situation that keeps SEO specialists awake at night. Not that the best VP of marketing since she was a leetle gurl knows wtf she's doing anyway. So there's that.



Someone sent me that image earlier, along with this:

quote:

The Google algorithm has associated you with the knowledge graph and is now generating your profiles in relation to searches for the brand.

Honestly, in the "SEO" sorcery space... that means OWNED and would cause a crisis for brand rep. THAT is why Sandy angers me. Don't call yourself a VP when failing at basics with no formal study or true industry experience: BEHOLD THE IMAGE.

What you've done is every SEO "brand reputation manager's" dream.

The #1 request is: Something negative about me shows up on page 1. Realistically, given way algorithm works and signals it detects, hard for 95% of brands to fix it
too long to explain even though I spam you, and like NDA issues, but many brands are internal messes that prevent corrective action.

The thing is, it is often a link to an article A LINK TO AN ARTICLE. Not an individual showing up with his loving mug shot on page one for a knowledge graph search on google.

Some of the client work I am dealing with now? They would have a heart attack if someone, an individual let's say a product critic with a well researched arsenal of content on his website showed up under their profile in the right hand bar as "also searched for".

Not only your name shows up for also searched for, beautiful google algorithm quirks and flaws picked up your profile pic. This is a neutral, no history, opt out of all ads, doesn't browse view tool I use for keywords to see visibility for terms when not influenced by a logged in gmail account nor cookies from google apps and api bs

SIR YOU ARE SHOWING UP ASSOCIATED WITH THEIR KNOWLEDGE GRAPH FOR BRANDED KEYWORDS.

That would cause a loving crisis.

If Sandi, was a true VP of marketing, she would be all over it... the funny bit is, because "link building" is still a thing, the most "authoritative" alternate source regarding SC is you in the google algorithm's mind currently (sans some manual manipulation internally at Google)

So to fix their search situation, they would literally need to work with you as long as you keep your domain and site active.

New consumers searching for "roberts space industries" or "star citizen" will see your profile unless they take serious corrective action to protect the brand on search. Sandi isn't doing that. A "marketing manager" or director could do what that VP is not.

trucutru posted:

D_Smart posted:

Evocati 3.0. Landing sucesfl

Mining is in!

reddit posted:

As much as I think Derek Smart and his 'goons' are absolute twats, I can't help but feel increasingly hopeless about the project. I think we just keep making excuses for them because we want it so badly to be real. But, I mean, if you had told somebody last year that we'd be reasonably speculating February 2018 for a slightly scaled back version of 3.0, you'd be called a hater.
I still desperately want to have faith in the project, but I can't help but feel like in February 2018, due to unforeseen circumstances, we'll be speculating April 2018 for the awaited content drop.

SomethingJones posted:

Good news everyone, CIG have just started advertising for a backend server MMO programmer to work on their exciting PC space combat sim, Star Citizen!
https://cloudimperiumgames.com/jobs/619-Gameplay-Engineer-Service-Backend



• Online game and/or MMO development experience, ideally including interfacing with backend server code.

• One or more shipped products, especially PC products.
• CryEngine/Lumberyard development experience.
• Space combat sim development experience. e - (they need someone who has done this before to do stuff that's never been done before)
• Passion for science fiction and space exploration

This exciting new role takes the number of published vacancies to 64, the highest it's been since March 2016.

D_Smart posted:

I think I am pretty close to this. Though I have zero LumberYard experience, I am very familiar with CryEngine though.

I haven't had a resume since Carter was POTUS, but I wonder if I should put one together and send it in to see how long I can troll them for.

TheAgent posted:

friend: hey dude, I'm looking for a job is CIG any good? they've been headhunting like crazy lately

me: hold on a sec, I gotta post this in a giant thread dedicated to how hosed up that entire company is

friend: what

AP posted:

https://go.twitch.tv/videos/187704629?t=21m12s
Video Summary: The Captain's Table admits CitizenCon was a snoozefest on the level of 1 hour presentation of Spectrum last year.

Sabreseven posted:

Felt like doing a thing before we go out for fireworks, so I did a thing:



Art shamelessly archered from a Viz comic

Erenthal posted:

Toops posted:

Oh and Destiny 2 is a nothingburger piece of poo poo too, and you can purchase everything in Assassin's Creed with real money.

Gaming is hosed.

thank god roberts is here to finally save pc gaming

thank god

SomethingJones posted:

Supercruise was the DDF's (Frontier's sperg army) sole contribution to the game and is the dullest part of the game. In fact it's the dullest part of any game ever. In terms of gameplay it's the equivilent of 1984 Elite with the 'J' key jump drive disabled so you'd have to sit and watch the loving thing in real time which is what you do in ED. Sit. And. Watch. It. In. Real. Time.

Star Citizen has taken one of those types of spergs and have them design an entire game.

Solarin posted:

Daztek posted:

https://i.imgur.com/VfYkmmM.gifv

3.0 is good

stimpire muscle torture fetish is IN

his nibs posted:

at least the doors are working

Citizen posted:

Diduknow #StarCitizen: Pioneer license will claim a ground from approximately 4x4km up to 8x8km. It's a Skyrim map size, estimated at 6x6km.

TheAgent posted:

just remember, some people have been in crunch mode for almost two full years now

the other ones, like some peeps that I know, straight up walked out after 3 to 6 months of that poo poo, mostly because there was no end in sight, no goal to reach to end the crunch and no rewards or incentives for your sacrifice

now you've got 26 year olds leading entire teams with no prior game or managerial experience, working constantly because they have no idea its a bad thing. they take their cues straight from roberts on how to manage your employees: "do what I say, exactly how I say, or quit"

the tales that you're going to hear next year are going to loving astound some people. I'm sure the die hardest backers, whose money will have paid for expensive trips for executives, producing terrible indie films, and weathly as gently caress lifestyles, will simply never believe a goddamn bad thing about the savior of pc gaming chris roberts

TheAgent posted:

at what point do you mention to the backers that you're financing film careers? that you're starting to broadcast yourself as a digital effects company, with access to superior motion capture and CGI technologies? don't you think someone on this great big internet is going to loving find out about it?

I mean, I guess you can hope that the game comes out to rousing success before then, and of course, of course! hollywood and special effects are a perfect fit for chris roberts, so its no big deal he's spending a lot of time and resources and backer money doing hollywood things

but goddamn chris, y'all playing with loving fire


like hey, here's a bad thing: we are running out of money to develop a game

and yeah, we've taken out a few loans and are really, really hoping no one looks too closely at this whole UK tax credit thing and yeah, yeah we are down almost 30% in revenue from last year so far

but also! intel paid for our last two shows, amazon floated us some monies and we're only a wee bit behind

but hey, here's a good thing: we got a loving major cash injection from a movie production company to do their digital effects! the company is saved

also I need all the art teams focused on the movie stuff because we have a four month deadline for our portion of the vfx, but this is also okay because we need six months or so to get our programmers to finish our engine

Beet Wagon posted:

lol, game's been in dev long enough that peoples' commemorative merch is falling apart. (Yes, I know it's a lovely Chinese product that was probably falling apart the day he got it, but drat if that isn't Star Citizen in a nutshell)

Toops posted:

Honestly, I'm fuckin' proud of you, Chris. You aimed for the stars, missed horribly, and landed in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Let this be a lesson to you all. Got an idea? Just loving do it. Find a way. Make it work. Always do, even if you're a complete gently caress up. The universe loves action, it needs juice, and as long as you just show up and try, you win. Get off the loving internet. Stop watching the loving TV. Don't play video games, they're all just poo poo designed to keep you off the playing field. And NEVER let that nagging fuckster in the back of your mind tell you you're gonna fail.

Chris Roberts wins at life. He laughs all the way to the mobile banking app on his phone to check his auto-regenerating bank account balance. Scummy? Oh what the gently caress ever. He played by the written rules and that's all that matters. Bad person? I don't know him, but he pays for his wife's movie dreams and gives all his friends jobs, and that's a hell of a lot more than most of us. Immoral? Didn't know you were runing the books on that one. And I'll tell you what. It's immoral to let people as stupid as Star Citizens, with their loving cringecore stunted bullshit fantasies, keep their money. Who the gently caress would wanna make a game for that lot of losers anyway?

gently caress em. gently caress you. And gently caress me.

Chris Roberts is a genius, and he deserves to enjoy his Porches, because god dammit, at least he got up off his rear end and tried.

thatguy posted:

https://i.imgur.com/vSSx323.mp4

RubberJohnny posted:

As we approach a year without an update, and CIG managing 0 out of 5 of the updates they promised would arrive this year (3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.0, SQ42 release), take a look at the communities reaction to the Gamescom 2016 schedule

quote:

i think it'll pick up steam into this next year.
the major ground works is finishing up or done and Foundry 42 in the UK will be finishing up with SQ42 content production which means their largest studio can roll over and start making content for the PU.

quote:

If I have learned anything having watched all the CIG events since Citizencon 2014 I have learned that none of their roadmaps ever amount to much. I think the one thing we can reasonably expect is that 3.0 will be close to what they have said it will be and that 4.0 will be the first patch to introduce another system.
Specifically I don't expect them to introduce the new mechanics and large ships anywhere near as quickly as they desire. I wouldn't doubt that they could get 4.0 out around early to mid 2018 though.

quote:

Personally I doubt they will let it languish for 6 months without an update, I think 2-4 months between updates is a bit more realistic. Though I highly doubt they will stick anywhere near that roadmap.

Matoi Ryuko posted:

When I was a child, I played the Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness demo. My computer wasn't powerful enough to run it, so what I saw was a scrambled video, instead of the normal game, but I could still play the game through sound and the occasional tiny window through the scrambling. When I finally got the game to work, it suddenly wasn't as interesting. It was easy now. What had changed was that the game no longer required me to engage my imagination, and that's what they're selling at CiG, a chance to engage your imagination.

They've monetized your imagination, as a business model.

big nipples big life posted:

How about a summary

AP posted:

#More mo-cap

alphabettitouretti posted:

youtube.com/watch?v=Igb9IkVOiAE

$164m well spent. 3.0 is surely just days away from release.

crobber ya game all hosed up. Although if your goal was to make a sequel to octodad, good job I guess.

alphabettitouretti posted:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Cloud-Imperium-Games-RVW17730194.htm

quote:

I worked at Cloud Imperium Games full-time (More than 3 years)

Pros
* However this project and business turn out I'm happy I got to work on this once in a lifetime project that has really pushed boundaries in many areas of software development, games development, networking, and computer science.
* Despite a lot of my ex-colleagues being younger, newer in the industry and sometimes inexperienced / naïve, they really worked incredibly hard and with huge amounts of enthusiasm, sometimes to the detriment of their own wellbeing and personal lives.
* The offices and infrastructure are great with absolutely no expense spared in allowing us to get our jobs done.
* Despite some of my criticisms below I would definitely do it all over again but I would also get out earlier.

Cons
* A lot of the management have little to no idea what they are doing, use software development methodologies from the last century and are frankly out of their depth. This causes an exponentially increasing spiral of delays that a modern experienced project manager would see coming from a mile away and know how to deal with. The project is getting ever further away from completion despite what public statements to the contrary say. These managers may have been the best of the best back in their day, but it is no longer that day and people rarely have consistent hits their entire career.
* This issue is compounded by the fact that CIG pays below industry average salaries, because they correctly think many people will want the prestige of having worked on such an exciting project to be on their CV, however you also don't get the best talent this way.
* Both the salary and management issues have caused a lot of more experienced staff who were really making the most progress to leave. A lot of the people left are fairly wet behind the ears and need a lot more mentoring before stepping up to the plate. I spent over half my time mentoring other members of staff even in areas I only have a vague passing knowledge of.
* Collectively we ended up grinding harder and harder, losing increasingly more of our lives, over smaller and smaller irrelevant things that the CEO dreamed up. This has been getting worse recently not better, especially with recent technologies added to the game that should have been implemented at the end, not now.

Advice to Management
Hire experienced executives and professional project managers with current decade skills and qualifications - Not family members, friends or old contacts.

Keep on doing what you're doing.

G0RF posted:

Ouch — this one goes for the tender underbelly and kicks the tenders after. It will surely be claimed as fakery, but as with the Jennison letter, it reads as authentic, holistically informed and bitterly resigned.

One of the great remaining myths that zealots and whales cling to is that Chris, Erin, Tony and the other graybeards are wizards trained in the secret sorcery of ancient forgotten gaming magic. Their willingness to believe this is profound because decades back, the younger versions of these men delivered a nifty game here and there. Or at least had their name on one. And zealots played them at a highly impressionable age. Yet that magic they remember so fondly now was not crafted by Roberts or his cronies — the magic they recall was Youth.

The notion that Chris & Co., rather than being Jedi masters of gaming, are in fact out-of-their-depth relics, hopelessly out of step with the times and simply incapable of comprehending let alone dominating 2017-era AAA gaming — it’s simply unthinkable to the zealot core.

The evidence is everywhere:

—The Zeno’s paradox of infinite subdivisions of distance to 3.0...
—“Welcome to BURNDOWN, our weekly look at our progress in eliminating blockers and bugs keeping us from release of the first fraction of our first of 100 star systems in the first person universe we’re claiming we can build...”
—A space sim that still hasn’t delivered a satisfying flight model after half a decade of futzing around with it...
—“I just want to sell the narrative...”
—“WORM IS NOT A JOKE!”
—The fact that their unironically admitting, in year five, that they’re closing in on their first complete game loop...
—“Legacy armor” (in a pre-Alpha!)
—“You can fit the whole of Skyrim in that crater right there...”
—Face Over IP
—and so on...

The entire project is now a NeoTokyo of bright blinking warning signs yet Chris is himself is so completely and hopelessly deluded — convinced not just of his adequacy (lol) but his supremacy — and his acolytes and enablers derive their misplaced confidence in him from him. It’s from this desperate collusive delusion that for many emerges a similar dread fear of irrelevancy. Star Citizen, while never overtly pitched as such, is their shared escape route from this fear into a utopia of relevancy, power and decisive personal agency — as the ample novellas of therycrafting so often attest. And for Chris, too, the game is meant as such, a statement to the compromised studios and evil publishers that “I’m still here and my game is BETTER than your game because I’m STILL a great Game Developer!”

How strange that only 5 or 6 years ago, a husband and wife had what surely sounds like a kick-to-curb warning, during which she told him, “If this doesn’t work out, I’m sure someone will hire you.”

Good thing it worked out. For both of them. For awhile anyway. But the downward spiral is well underway and everyone who can’t see it clearly senses it anyway. And the bitterest lesson of all is that Chris Roberts was given the greatest opportunity in the history of gaming — a gargantuan budget and limitless freedom — and with that freedom he destroyed the gift and left only the grim and slim hope that some salvageable mediocrity might somehow be recovered from the wreckage. We’ll see how that works out.

Citizen posted:

Citizen posted:

I think this goes without saying, but there is a point where something turns from helping fund a game and simply pre-purchasing in game benefits. Constantly monetizing seemingly every new ship coming out feels more and more like buying trading cards for a TCG and sitting around realizing there isn't a way to get the full experience out of it because the final released game is still a ways away.

CIG wins as soon as they release the game. We lose if they cut features or performance to get it out the door quicker. Let's hope they can keep delaying the win till the game is ready.

D_Smart posted:

3.0 is a paradox for them. If they release is inside of the next 4-5 months, they're completely hosed (even more). If they don't release it, they're royally hosed.

God I hope they release it for Christmas.

Burndown Summary posted:

here's a TLDR version of burndown this week on progress towards PTU release

Shopping/Cargo
Bugs: 20 -> 30 (+50%)

Missions
Bugs: 11 -> 22 (+100%)
Tasks: 76 -> 91 (+20%)

Ships/Vehicles
Bugs: 6 -> 6 (0%)
Tasks: 31 -> 47 (+52%)

Traversal
Bugs: 2 -> 2 (0%)
Tasks: 22 -> 18 (-18%)

Mobiglass
Bugs: 18 -> 18 (0%)
Tasks: 42 -> 48 (+14%)

Performance stability
Tasks: 63 -> 57 (-9%)

TheLastRoboKy posted:

peter gabriel posted:

Hand got stuck in there, they're still trying to get it out and it's just wobbling and slapping all over the place and everything is going everywhere send help.

Slow_Moe posted:

Fostering elitism is the backbone of CIG's funding. The elitist are willing to pay huge sums to be elite in game, and as such, CIG caters exclusively to them. Which, when the game launches (stop laughing) will heavily dis incentivize regular players from joining up. And then all the whales, with their paid for advantages, will square off against each-other. But since there is no regular players for them to lord over, they will feel grief instead of superiority.

It's gonna be yuge.

Natron posted:

When I was watching the dreadful panel on base building or whatever at citizen con, I honestly thought they were gearing up to sell plots of land on planets.

I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if they did, but they'd have to make a planet first, I guess. Or not, citizens will buy it regardless, let's face it.

Breetai posted:

I know that by admitting this I'm announcing a loss as I'm letting myself get caremad about stupid nerd culture bullshit, but there's a particular type of pop culture nerd who just loooves the idea of mashing up multiple geek IPs together and will breathlessly gush about "WOULDN'T IT BE SO COOL IF HARRY POTTER COULD BE IN THE STAR WARS UNIVERSE AND ALSO THE XENOMORPH FROM ALIENS WAS THERE?!?", and it really annoys me. The thought process appears to be 'I like X and I like Y, therefore if X and Y were together it would be EVEN MORE awesome".

But all it really does is betray a shallow-to-nonexistent understanding of what makes their preferred movie/book/whatever good. It shows a paucity of knowledge with regards to the concept of tone or theme in fictional works. Which is fine when you're 10 and the reason you like Starship Troopers is you get to watch the Good Guys shoot the bugs, but when you're a grown adult and you don't understand that Captain Kirk beaming down to King's Landing is going to be poo poo, it's a problem. And it's an even bigger problem when you're directing a multimillion dollar video game.

So yeah: put in a sandworm because you like sandworms because they're big and scary. And put in the planet from pitch black. And put in a Blade Runner cityscape. And put in Space Rome and Space China and service means citizenship. Surely your messianic horror cyberpunk space opera with social commentary won't be a jumbled mess.

Or at least in this case it won't because Roberts is adding them in with no regard to their thematic content nor to the context that they were originally displayed in. It's a sizzle reel approach where he's including things without understanding them because he thinks they're cool.

Sci-fi video game creator Chris Roberts doesn't understand the first loving thing about sci-fi, and neither does his audience.

The Titanic posted:

According to Amazon themselves, the network system they’ve built is not designed for a persistent MMO environment. At least not currently.

So yet again, right out of the box, Chris Roberts is just saying “but yuh huh! You just didn’t try hard enough!” directly to the company that actually built the network system.

So chances are high that when CIG moved to Lumberyard, they just brought their same arena type networking and had to fix it to run on an AWS cloud, and probably gave up shortly after they realized they lacked skill to do more.

Unfortunately for a lot of groups new to AWS and cloud computing, they think they can sacrifice smart coding practices and intelligent network design by increasing the processing power and throughput of their server, and sometimes up to a point this actually works; but it kills them in the long run because their growth was tied to how fast they can make a cluster, and there is a cap. Once people reach that cap, reality hits them in the face like a freight train.

I’m not a game developer though, but I’ve developed cloud architecture and this method of thinking persists a lot unfortunately. I have no reason to believe CR doesn’t think he can fix everything by throwing more computer power at it from the cloud.

Preen Dog posted:

This guy is legit amazing. He filled 9 full minutes, emphatic and believable, bragging about how they spent man-weeks (and writing a separate exe for testing) tuning the acceleration curve of the hyperspacing ships. Literally, how fast do we want to lerp to the jump destination and what particle effects should play for different speeds. The guy fully understands that this is an inexcusable waste of time while critical features and bugs are ignored, but he still manages to come across as a visionary code-philosopher doing God's work.

And the painstakingly made notes, a-la Se7en. It's beautiful.

D_Smart posted:

DapperDon posted:

As a quick question to you and others here that DO KNOW this stuff. Does Amazon's Lumber Yard do well with networking? In other words, is it Lumberyard being choked by CIG's Frankenengine or is it an incompatibility with it?

Nobody knows, since there are currently NO RELEASED GAMES that use LumberYard. The engine, as a whole, is all very experimental - and still in Beta.

What I do know is that the CryEngine networking layer was always rubbish; and isn't something that they were actively interesting in improving because most of the games the engine targeted, with simple 16-player games, with lobbies. Forget about loving MMOs.

And in the latest LY build, they even deprecated the entire CryEngine network layer in favor of their own. Which makes sense, since AWS is network-centric and they would have top tier network engineers there.

The LumberYard engine was never designed for MMO games. At all. Even AMZ states this clearly in their docs and faqs about what the engine is designed to do, and the limitations/strengths of the networking component.

Whoever wants to use LY for MMO games, is i) one dumb sumbitch ii) an incompetent moron

There was also indication that they were either using, or planning to use this experimental bullshit called yojimbo which they were Golden backers of. If they did end up using it, loving because it explains everything.

If they are now testing 60 client sessions, it's not because they magically came up with new networking tech (note that it's not listed anywhere in the dev schedule) at the spur of the moment. It's because they have realized that the AWS instances (these are the different tiers) they were usingvfor severs, are simply incapable of handling the additional poo poo that 3.0 is now throwing at it. Unfortunately for them, moving to higher tier AWS instances is not only going to cost them money, but it's also NOT going to solve the networking/connectivity problem. It's just going to solve the server's ability to just gently caress off and die at some point. And it was doing just that - CONSISTENTLY - in the tests they just had.

Using the cloud to build a MMORPG <-- This is theoretical and shows you what's possible, not that it's possible for a real-time game, with high fidelity visuals etc

Building a World in the Clouds: MMO Architecture on AWS (MBL304) | AWS <-- This is how Firefall did it. Multiplayer was pure poo poo. And the game died. As did the company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvJPyjmfdz0 <--- This is how Frontier did it. And they don't even try to do anything more than 32 clients within a "bubble/island"

They're completely and utterly hosed; and Star Citizen will never - ever - be an MMO. Backers should just pray that they are one day able to play with 32 of their friends in a session. loving if they all have multi-crew ships.

Scruffpuff posted:

The primary issue holding Star Citizen back, in my mind, is not related to technology per se.

You can write a 900-page blog about how it's impossible or extraordinarily difficult. (Note to self: somebody might have already written one, I have to look into that.)

We can watch their horrific development practices and constant missteps all day and show that each one, by itself, stops Star Citizen from coming out, much less considering all the mistakes in aggregate.

But none of that matters. The primary issue that keeps Star Citizen from releasing is that their monetization scheme runs in 100% opposition to releasing a game, or even fixing what they have.

Many things need to be gutted to the core and either reworked or rebuilt from the ground up, but that can't happen because it must be 3.0, then 3.1, etc. The backers must continue to see numbers go up, and iterations of the current build continuing apace, or the funding is threatened.

The entire flight model needs reworking, before the finalized pretty models are put in, but that can't happen, because the finished models are what they're selling - not the game.

They're selling finalized game assets and the illusion of progress, and that decision doomed the game. Any course correction at this point threatens to sink the incoming funds, and then it's truly over.

That is the true E.L.E. - the point of no return they reached at some point in the last couple years when they had the chance to go back and do it right, and chose instead to forge ahead with a broken system. Now that the funding and the development efforts are fully opposed, it's only a matter of time before they collide.

TheLastRoboKy posted:

Hopefully someone still has the screenshot cause this was a fair while ago, back around those heady days before even the persistent universe kicked in. Anyway a guy who wanted to do podcasts and stuff about Star Citizen and other space games cracked a joke in a previous incarnation of this thread (I think about people killing themselves over Star Citizen), and not too long afterwards Sandi emailed him a screencap of his post, and then as an aside demanded to know if he had in fact been complaining that CIG wouldn't give him the time of day for interviews for his show. It was such a ham-handed attempt at trying to scare him it kind of beggared belief but really was the first major highlight for us that people were watching this thread, feeding this information back to at the very least Sandi, and that they thought that they could try to silence dissent with the implied threat of freezing people out. Freezing people out of what I'm not sure since nothing's loving come out.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

Another weird thing was that at one of the conventions they gave Sandi a fake award that was like a golden computer or something that was for "putting up with poo poo on the internet."

As far as I know she never had any online presence in the Star Citizen community at all so what poo poo was she putting up with exactly?

Consider
- Your example of her personally responding to posts from this thread
- People being banned on RSI for posting here
- After we criticized giving Ben donuts she awkwardly came out and placed a huge bag of donuts in the center of the frame while looking at the camera
- After we made fun of her looking high as gently caress with huge glasses and stuffing her face during shows later she just weirdly stared into the camera and started eating while smirking

I think she's probably narcissistic enough to have been reading this thread personally. Which is funny because it means that we have had more direct influence on Star Citizen than any of the whales have had while paying 0$.

D_Smart posted:

Also, I remember that time when, having been accused of lying about her credentials, she did this:

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/636394150913445888

The Titanic posted:

I’m only surprised that people are still surprised today when they realize they are getting censored. Censorship has always been a major part of the CIG campaign, and also a huge pillar for its detractors.

CIG has been removing posts to “concern” or deleting them since maybe about a year into the project. The major selling point for their whole Spectrum stuff was to help them censor posts better. If they didn’t like something, they prevent new posts, and then it magically disappears out of view.

If any of the upset users are reading this, this isn’t a new thing. CIG very much does specifically go out of their way to ensure they control the narrative of what potential new and existing backers can read. This is because their business plan doesn’t involve actually releasing a product.

Go ahead and ask CIG how they plan to maintain an international company after they release a buy-once non-subscription model game to consumers. You’ll get no answers from CIG, but about a million different responses from sycophants. Probably almost as many answers as you would if you asked about even basic gameplay mechanics.

There is a reason for that, but you’ll need to put 2 and 2 together on your own, and not think it’s some stupid “goon conspiracy”. It’s all CIG, all the way down to the rotten core.

Thoatse posted:

There wasn't always heavy censorship, at least not obvious stuff at first. IIRC it wasn't until sometime between the LTI Uprisings and when Arena Commando released and the great Flight Model Wars began. At first they just katamari'd posts they didn't like from a really wide range of barely related poo poo, making those subjects too hard to meaningfully follow (especially without being able to tell where posts/threads originated once spliced in) with their fast and loose qualifiers. It was well contained from normal sight since most folks avoided the forum mosh pits since it was still a hopeful time and circlejerking still didn't require erection enhancements for a lot of the og's, but eventually the waters of discontent started overflowing the levees of the toxic waste pits they were consigned to.

That's when they came up with the 'concern' forum, a special walled garden gulag to hide unsightly posts and naughty hints of disbelief or talk of accountability in a dungeon far from public view and even obscured from wide eyed inductees. Moderation became increasingly heavy handed as dreams continued to collide with reality, a patch a time back when they still did that and at some point they needed even more control to maintain the narrative. CIG had long since recognized r/starcitizen was where the whales really hung out anyhow, so they capitalized on the existing arrangement once the katamari's and Concern forum and brownshirting was no longer enough to staunch the flow coming from the cracks.

Enter, Spectrum. They made a site that's basically their own little North Korea that makes it easy to keep up appearances and disappear anyone/anything unbefitting of dear leader's vision^TM but also made such a lovely mess of the forum for users that there was a critical mass herd migration to reddit. There they can generally maintain the narrative between sycophant brigades, retards on reddit, sunk cost grey marketers and good ole astroturfing etc, though outside the hugbubble of r/sc they often get drown in the bathtub of facts by non cultists that recognize the situation is laughably abnormal 6 years/160mil into this fever dream.

Sabreseven posted:

VictorianQueerLit posted:

Banks don't sell you products for putting your money into your account. This goes down to the very definition of transactions and commerce and this argument is so transparent you might as well type "Well I'm going to just make up whatever I have to do post positively about Star Citizen."

If CIG doesn't want people returning thousands of dollars of products they haven't received yet they should either stop selling so many products they aren't making or actually loving make them.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

The logical conclusion that with millions of dollars on the line they straight up lied about the state of their product is just ridiculous. (Company) wouldn't misrepresent (Product) for money! They love me!

VictorianQueerLit posted:

My theory is this:

Once 2017 hit Squadron 42 isn't being talked about much anymore. Work probably progressed on it or The Prelude until early this year and at some point the idea had to have been abandoned. I tend to think that all the leaks about how ridiculous the animation data was were correct. Especially when you consider the slides putting this at 10x the speaking roles of actual studio releases of animated films. Chris Roberts had wanted to make a movie and had generated 90% footage and 10% gameplay with most of his budget and the footage was largely worthless due to the work required to turn tens of millions of dollars of motion capture data into anything resembling a game with a narrative that he could sell for $60.

I think they have shifted along this path

- Planning to develop both games simultaneously with 4 studios
(time passes)
- Already past their release date with tens of millions in Squadron 42, complete focus on finish it (Maintenance Mode PU)
(time passes)
- Unable to deal with the hilarious clusterfuck Chris Roberts filmed, scope is reduced and a smaller step will be taken toward Squadron 42, further forgetting the PU (Prelude, A year without patches)
(time passes)
- Development of anything to do with petabytes of mocap footage becomes so expensive that the forgotten PU is now front and center to make money (Fake Demos late 2016)
(a lot of time passes)
- Once the main 2017 sales start getting closer CIG starts producing more fake demos but is now apparently struggling to develop something that actually resembles them. (3.0) Work has obviously just started on it sometime recently but they are running with it 100% and are no longer talking about Squadron 42. Due to almost bankrupting the company on Squadron 42 for years their last resort is a broken tech demo they had largely been ignoring. It's all they have and that leads us to now where they are frantically trying to cram more features into an ancient engine they should have never used in the first place.

It's a shame that we have to speculate so much about what is actually happening at THE WORLD'S MOST OPEN GAME DEVELOPMENT STUDIO. I'm pretty confident about that chain of events and if I was as crazy as Derek i would probably look up all the supporting tweets and information for each step but I don't care enough to spend an eternity digging through endless amounts of bullshit to highlight my points.

peter gabriel posted:

D_Smart posted:

THE EVOCATI 3.0 CLIENT TEST FIASCO

So I wrote The Road To 3.0 article that the recent 48-60 client test was just a ruse and propaganda which just happens to start 2 weeks before the anniversary sales.

Like always it served no purpose other than to start propaganda ahead of the upcoming sale, as well as perhaps their testing of new (possibly .x.large) AWS tiers which they think is going to provide better experience and performance. (it’s not)

The main issue here is that they know the server can’t handle more than 10 clients in any reasonable (think combat, traversal etc) form, and that the server is still completely unstable. So, ask yourself why they’re doing these sort of client tests now, when they should be fixing bugs, getting the build complete, getting the game to run at least 16 clients – solid – before reaching for the insurmountable. It makes no sense. But it does make sense when you consider all the similar bullshit they’ve pulled these past years.

This was 48 player maxed out server. The physical core counts range from 4 to 20 cores.
Result:
- 11-13 average fps – with no combat
- 17-25 during server start and shortly after in a ship and just flying around – no combat

Yes, a 20 core Xeon @ 3.7Ghz can’t even handle 12 fps on average. And not even an overclocked 7700K @ 5Ghz could maintain 25 fps.
Remember, RSI/CIG keeps all this under wraps, is actively using DMCA takedowns on YouTube, Vimeo, etc to suppress this Evocati test information from getting out. For a game that’s supposedly “open development” and which backers have reportedly given $164 million to develop. As funding continues to decline (currently down -40%) drastically year on year, it’s clear to see that they are coming up with new tricks. But ignore us though, keep giving them money and wait for what comes next.



NEW SHELL COMPANY

In addition to the total of 16 corporations involved in this venture, a few days ago on 11/08/17, they created another one. This time a foreign entity called “Cloud Imperium LLC”. It’s not even complete yet, but you can go to https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/ and search for “Imperium” to pull it up. So that’s 17 in total now that we know of.

Beet Wagon posted:

lmao, Jester using an alt account to advertise black market services on the refunds subreddit. Now I've seen it all.

Exhibit A: this post by one Ivan_SC advertising black market poo poo on /refunds



Exhibit B: Jester responding to comments in that thread with comments clearly written as "Ivan" lol. These comments don't exist because as soon as he realized the issue he deleted them, but since he's flagged for manual comment approval they're still in the modmail. Whoops!

Beet Wagon posted:

It's a common issue if you use their app - it'll show you PMs and comment replies for all your accounts regardless of which one you're currently signed in as. It also lets you respond to them, and doesn't show you which account you're logged in as until after lol. Reddit is poo poo.

Solarin posted:

Dementropy posted:

Star citizen is some kind of loving scam fractal

reddit posted:

Beet posted:

Dude come on. It's okay to have an alt account. In fact it makes sense with the way CIG deals with black market trades - you'd want to protect your grey market account of course. You and I both know what comments you made and deleted on this account.
I'm only frustrated because as a moderator you should know better than to advertise on someone else's subreddit without asking.

jester86 posted:

Nah I was pretty vocal about my ceasing trading a few years ago, enough was enough and there's no money left in it. Ivan and I are org mates though.

OldSchoolCmdr posted:

You're a liar (which is no surprise) and you have finally been caught Red handed again. I have first hand experience with your lies and duplicitous nature.
This is why as the mod of a hate sub engaged in targeted harassment of a guy writing about the project, you have every reason and incentive to encourage attacks and defamation against him. Because you benefit financially from it.

jester86 posted:

Holy gently caress that was quick! I knew it! Ahahahah I knew it. But no, I'm not him. My org knows us as separate people, we used to deal a store together, I used him to sell off my ships when I wanted out, that's the extent of it. Sorry to crush your dreams. But hell go write a blog anyway.

Morningwoodpecker posted:

So when jester was handing out bans and deleting posts from anyone who said he had a financial motive for running r/ds, not only were they absolutely right but he was deliberately and dishonestly abusing his mod powers to conceal it from the nerds he was stealing from and encouraging to attack the warlord.

Scams within scams.

jester86 posted:

Discussing the archive's future

So for a long time we've discussed (internally) on what the end goal and exit strategy for this archive is. It's purpose is to discuss Derek's gripes, groans and opinions, however that comes at a cost - namely, our sanity. It's not sustainable given the amount of moderation this community needs lately.

after trying various crowd control techniques over the past 2 years the only real option left, in my opinion, is switching to read only.

Originally we had discussed doing this when 3.0 was released as the public build. Unfortunately that's taking a lot longer (re: months, years) than we'd hoped and now that the Christmas season is upon us we're faced with the issue of holidays and the extra traffic (and potential increase in Derek's posting habits) it brings. I won't be here for most of December so I know this place will probably go to poo poo without me keeping an eye on it. Trying to keep it afloat during my honeymoon was very difficult and not something I want to attempt doing again on my next holiday.

Tokamak posted:

With 3.0 entering evocati, it is only a matter of weeks not months until Derek is proven wrong once and for all. Instead of hanging around to enjoy the moment and watch Derek meltdown like Chernobyl, I'm going to shut up shop because... I'm busy all of a sudden.
Forever un-bamboozled,
Jester86

Virtual Captain posted:

Clear some space in the trophy room:

BoredDellTechnician posted:

/r/DerekSmart has never been a democracy. There will be no public vote as to the future of the subreddit. At this point the moderation staff is severely fatigued and is suffering repeated personal attacks, which is completely unacceptable.
As of next week, /r/DerekSmart will transition to read only and ultimately will be sent to private access at an undetermined future date.

BluesShaman posted:

"We're not owned! We're not owned!" the posters of r/ds shrieked as often and as loudly as possible before the enveloping silence...

Ghostlight posted:

"This doesn't mean you won!" I sneer with my face pressed to the ground by Alexander's sandal and illuminated by fires in Persepolis.

Beet Wagon posted:

It's one of my favorite parts of this whole thing. The whole bottom half of the meta thread over there is people crying about "how come /refunds isn't going read-only?"

Uhhhh.... cause we actually discuss refunds there instead of writing murder fanfiction about a stranger.

Dementropy posted:

reddit posted:

Oh, look! There's Derek claiming victory thinking he got us closed down!
Hey Derek! You didn't get us closed down! We left you!

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

https://i.imgur.com/ML4i6mC.mp4

https://i.imgur.com/qpQX9Xf.mp4

Jobbo_Fett posted:

YOU KNOW WHAT'S RETARDED IN VIDEO GAMES TODAY?!

LOOTBOXES!


*Buys a fake vending machine for his fake hangor filled with fake ships WHERE NOTHING loving WORKS*

Viktor posted:

Interesting post from a software developer I do respect:

GitLab Blog posted:

Refactoring is that word that a new, super-green developer mentions on day one when they suggest to rewrite everything in Angular. That hasn't happened at GitLab. Our frontend devs tend to be very conservative, which is a very good thing. Which begs the question, why does it seems like everyone is always refactoring? What are they trying to achieve? I can only speak for GitLab. What do we want to achieve with a refactor? In reality it's going to cost a lot of money.

The costs are:
Cost of doing the refactoring.
Cost of testing the change.
Cost of updating tests and documentation.

You also have more risk:
Risk of introducing bugs.
Risk of taking on a huge task that you can't finish.
Risk of not achieving the quality/improvements you intended.

The Titanic posted:

The soul of the project has transformed from passion into deceit. Here’s my general take on the transformation:

My opinion on this is that one of the big drama bombs was Sandi, because she actually believed she was literally the smartest person in the room at all times. There are others as well, but she was a Star because of her attitude.

This ultimately lead to her direct confrontation with Beer4TheBeerGod in a CS case, which ultimately resulted in her looking like a fool.

When all this happened, she pulled out of Twitter, pulled out of customer service, and basically pulled out of everything not related to being on camera or hobnobbing with movie stars.

I firmly believe that up to this point, Star Citizen was very personal to her. She was personally invested in its success because she was making tons of money from it, and up to now had fought tooth and nail to make it what it was. During her come to Beer moment though, she realized being made a fool publicly wasn’t worth it anymore, and she had more than enough money to just do what she wanted to do (be an actress), so has since vanished onto the cutting room floor of indie Hollywood movies. She no longer cares about the game because she already is a millionaire.

So why then is there less drama now than there was before? Well, simply put it’s no longer personal for the head people who couldn’t be trusted with themselves. They’ve made their money, and can just keep “doing what they do” and ignore the people bashing it.

They know Star Citizen is not going to become the game promised. So why defend it to the death like it will? No need. Just keep pimping, keep lying, and keep the narrative mostly positive like it’s real and they’ll keep making money until they want to stop the money train.

When this was a Roberts passion project there was plenty of fun to be had. But since it’s transformed into a very blatant cash grab, the passion is gone, the soul is black, and because of that there is really no excitement going on outside of laughing at the latest video of lies. It’s a soulless project now, and it shows on every level.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Xaerael posted:

So, here's the interesting thing about Lesnick's "joke website". Recently, my local MP was suspended for being a moron and saying poor taste things in his younger years.

CIG essentially promoted Ben after his, far worse, collection of thoughts were exposed.

Boy, those 1400+ screenshots of a Philadelphia News Reporter sure isn't creepy or stalker'ish behavior. That sort of creepy attitude is only a thing goons would do! NO, there's no double standard in labelling all goons as criminals when Ben Lesnick clearly is a racist gently caress and therefore that would mean all Star Citizens are racist fucks.


Now let me get back to jacking off to this reporter, I can almost smell the cheese steaks...

spacetoaster posted:

We called it "Ben-ghazi".

Here's the thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3772600

XK posted:

Not only was Ben in his mid 20s when he did a lot of the things on his website, he literally tried to blame attempting to be a cool kid like the people on SomethingAwful for his behavior, yet the site had equally representative behavior which predated the existence of SomethingAwful.

Also, if I remember correctly, he had publicly linked his website 6 months before any Goon found it. It was only when he publicly linked its existence a second time that somebody here found it.

We were literally digging for it so hard, he had to broadcast its existence twice before we saw it.

AP posted:

When Chris Roberts asked for $500,000 during the kickstarter he got $2,134,374, but that was great because he could make the game and it would be amazing.
In fact, if you add what they raised on their own website during the kickstarter period they raised $6.2 million. Then Chris Roberts said he was going to do without investors and could make the game for $14-20 million.
Reaching $20 million there was much joy, though costs and postage means they really need 23 million.
$23 million was duly raised.
The cheering was great at Games Com when Chris walked on stage to tell them they'd just broken $50 million.
According to the RSI website, they are currently on over $164 million, not counting several years worth of subscriptions.

Anyone mad about a few dozen people refunding, even if the amounts are sometimes in the thousands, is actually really worried $164 million isn't enough.

G0RF posted:

In far less provocative news, there’s a new CIG Interview at Glassdoor.

quote:

Interview Questions
”Describe this pen to me.”

So he/she failed to adequately describe a pen during a pear-to-pear interview. Next time he/she will nail it, though.

AP posted:

The nib is hand formed in 18-carat gold, contains military grade ink. The barrel is carved from Banu aromatic sandalwood. The pen is presented in a number limited edition wooden case, come with a brochure for the lucky purchaser or recipient. The discerning purchaser can also have the pen emblazoned with a custom phrase in Latin, a tidy $2,000 price tag.

Dementropy posted:

reddit posted:

We're receiving some updates that CSR's are now locking ships (they have a grey outline and are unmeltable) related to the scam alert posted yesterday. If you've bought anything recently you should check this is not the case for you. If it is, begin screenshotting Reddit communications, RSI details, invoice details etc. to supplement your Paypal dispute incase accounts are deleted.

Dusty Lens posted:

I believe it's saying that customer service reps are locking ships to accounts and preventing them from being turned into store credit or gifted to another account.

What that has to do with ship sales is beyond me. While I know that the process is pretty streamlined at this case I can't imagine that funds are being transferred beyond the hands of a middleman without some assurance that the ship itself can be moved.

That's why you use a middleman.

CIG loved shipsales back in the day as it presented not only a kind of safety valve for people contemplating dropping real cash (oh boy I can just flip it for a profit later) but really provided a sense of confidence in giving someone insane amounts of money amounted to some kind of investment that could be withdrawn from. For a long while now they've been making increasingly obvious movements towards viewing that collective pool of store credit as toxic and counter productive to bringing in new cash. So maybe they're adding additional obstacles to people being able to melt ships for credit?

Either way it's good news for Star Citizen.

Ursine Catastrophe posted:

1. You buy $100 worth of jpegs
2. You trade a $50 jpeg to someone else's account in exchange for their $30 jpeg
3. You request a refund
4. They investigate, say "you're only entitled to $50 of refunds"
5. You accept, they close your account, the $30 jpeg you traded for isn't yours to refund and just disappears into the ether

peter gabriel posted:

From top to bottom every single aspect of this project is hosed

SomethingJones posted:

https://cloudimperiumgames.com/jobs
Vacanies at 67, highest since March 2016

LA
Senior Gameplay Engineer
November 13, 2017

Requirements:
• Strong multi-threaded programming skills.
• Experience with multiplayer programming

Pluses:
• Online game and/or MMO development experience, ideally including interfacing with backend server code


Frankfurt
Senior Systems Designer
November 10, 2017

Responsibilities:
Design and develop new features for the Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe, working closely with the Lead Designer and the Game Director to ensure Chris Roberts’ vision for Star Citizen becomes reality.
Be the “go to” person for the implementation of complex systems that stretch the capabilities of the engine and challenge the expectations of the players.
Be a leader within the department for cleanly implementing content with our designer tools and scripting languages.
Develop prototypes that clearly articulate the vision of the features for which you are responsible.
Pitch concepts, designs and full-proposals to project leads.
Partner with cross-disciplinary teams to execute game systems.
Use expert data analysis skills plot how the game is being used. Draw conclusions and make recommendations for how to improve the experience.
Identify and resolve conflicts with other disciplines in a way that best meets the design goals of the project.
Review work at various stages of implementation to ensure the execution matches the vision, goals and quality requirements.
Routinely collect feedback from user-testing, the development team and design management.
Identify solutions to the problems expressed that won’t negatively impact other systems or mechanics.
Create and refine gameplay mechanics.
Contribute to Tools and workflow development, highlighting bottlenecks or suggesting areas where tools could improve workflow.

Requirements:
5+ years of professional experience in game development – in a System/Tech Designer capacity
Shipped (from pre-production to release) 2+, large scale, 3D titles (PC, current/next-gen consoles)
Knowledge and experience with a C style programming or scripting language.
Must have knowledge in writing script to handle gameplay systems such as weapon balancing, navigation mechanics, basic AI behavior, and scripted sequences.
Positive, solution-orientated individual with a passion for game development.
Experience with next generation AAA game engines.
High degree of self-motivation and initiative.
Inherent ability to bring out the best in people around you, remains positive, and motivate your team.
Expert in time management, verbal and written communication skills.
Ability to gather, analyze, and act on feedback from the team, openness to critique.
Passion and constant drive to stay up to date with latest technology and new techniques.
Excellent English communication and written skills.
Willing to relocate to Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
International Travel may be required as part of the role

Pluses:
Knowledge and prior experience with multiple scripting languages.
Experience with building behavior tree based AI.
FPS gameplay experience.
Massively Multiplayer Game experience.
MP debugging experience.
Knowledge with CryENGINE/LUMBERYARD
Experience in data analysis.
Strong interest in science fiction based themes.

Daztek posted:

lol

G0RF posted:

Schimmel has a proven talent for reinforcing Chris’s delusory sense of superiority to all any and all possible competitors and as such is indispensable.



Sometimes it seems like that is the LA office’s primary purpose, manning and fortifying the defensive perimeter around Chris’s precious and vulnerable ego. Whether it’s John Schimmel declaring the obvious superiority of the game they hadn’t even started building yet, or Ben Lesnick treating Wing Commander arcana he discovers on eBay like it was another Dead Sea Scrolls discovery at Qumran, or Josh Herman telling those snotty Foundry punks Amir Boparai & Ricky Jutley that “CR was not joking about the worm” (so you sure as hell better stop doing that), CIG LA is definitely keeping Chris awash in the luxuriating delusions to which he’s become accustomed.

Lol.

Beet Wagon posted:

lmbo

Sabreseven posted:

Star Citizen and CR a long analogy :

The most luxurious ship in the world, the RMS Titanic is sinking having struck an iceberg on her starboard bow, her bow is now under water up to the bridge and the lower decks are flooding fast, dragging the ill fated vessel to her doom. Captain Smith, a man of reputation and an experienced sailor, runs aft towards the galley, dodging through the crowd of over paying passengers, pausing only for autographs and to "um, er, 3 point oh" away questions of their fate. He finally reaches the galley, catching his breath and giving a cursory glace at the inventory of stores he spies the item he needs to save the ship.

Captain Smith, marches purposefully at an angle to counter the now heavily listing ship, to a fine glass cupboard, the engravings are wonderful. He reaches in and collects a small ornate sherry glass, with his prize secured he now begins to head downwards, into the bowels of the ship where he can work his way forward towards the damage. The lights are flickering as the doomed vessels electric generators and batteries are damaged by the salty brine welling up from the lower decks, he presses on into the gloom, water shin deep to start with but within a few short minutes he finds himself wading knee, then waist, then neck deep in frothy brine.

Finally, he has gone as far as he can, he is directly below the bridge and deep within the ship. Clamping an arm around an overhead freshwater pipe he retrieves the sherry glass from his jacket pocket, dips it into the seawater and then with a grimace and steely determination, turns to make the trip back to the upper promenade. The swim is perilous and long, but finally the water level becomes gradually lower until he see's the picture postcard perfect starry sky above. The over paying passengers see him rise from the service hatch, and gasp.

The Captain has only one final task to complete to save his beloved ship, with one hand over the top of the sherry glass to prevent the liquid from escaping, he strides confidently as far astern as he can, fighting gravity as the angle of the deck becomes ever steeper. He reaches the handrail of the port side promenade, the now silent crowd of passengers watch intently as their savior finishes what he started. In one deft move, Smith lifts his hand from the sherry glass and simultaniously pours the contained saltwater over the side back to whence it came.

The passengers erupt in a cacophony of roaring cheers that shakes and rattles the very deck they are standing on, arms are flung high, smiles abound "He's done it, we're saved!!" they chant almost in unison, eyes bulging, faces reddening, capileries bursting with the screaching effort. Lifting the brave Captain onto their shoulders, they parade him over to the starboard side and place him down, he nods and smiles, then jumps on the jetski which is packed with moneybags he had parked beside the ship and fucks off leaving them all to die while he laughs all the way to the bank. The end.

Daztek posted:

Evocati testing going well!

They don't bother emailing you about the tests/procedures so if you're not on the Spectrum 24/7 you might get banned

big nipples big life posted:

The people who paid thousands of dollars to test our software are not following our exact orders!

Golli posted:

I guess it would make too much sense to hire a contractor to conduct testing using known hardware configurations to follow test scripts and submit data in a timely and consistent manner.

It only makes sense if you are serious about putting out an actual product, though. So in this context, the approach they've taken makes perfect sense

Jobbo_Fett posted:

YOU DIDN'T SPAWN THE RIGHT SHIP?! WELL WE'RE GONNA RUB YOUR NOSE IN YOUR PISS-STAINED MESS!


Take that, person who's given us money!

If you can't trust the members of your super secret club of exclusivity, who the gently caress can you trust?

Loxbourne posted:

DapperDon posted:

In the history of video games, has there ever been a project that has such an authoritative iron fist and thirst for vindictive revenge, punishment, cruelty, and humiliation as this? Because for the life of me I thought these things were SUPPOSED to be fun.

It's not working. They can't make it work. People in authority above them are dishing out punishments for not making it work. Sooner or later, people start thinking it'll work if they hurt their enemies.

They've already ground through filthy refunders, insufficently committed fellow believers, and spies/sabotage from Big Publishing. Now they're down to members of their own elite super-loyal testing group who don't obey orders. Surely if they punish these people hard enough, Star Citizen will start being good and Chris will stop yelling at them.

Abuminable posted:

XK posted:

Based on the deleted video, they have the same access as normal. They choose a ship from a menu on the Port Olisar computer terminal. Then the computer literally gives them the wrong ship. lol

That's neat... so they might get banned from the evocati for spawning a blacklisted ship they didn't even request

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

An evocati goon sent me this on his carrier pigeon:

We have access to all the ships in etf but we literally had to fight for it, because cig wanted players to play like they only had access to their paid ships. Which is hilarious if you consider that half the ships in the game have horrendous bugs that need desperate focus testing. Pointing this out was the argument that ultimately persuaded CIG to give us access to all of them.

Krycek posted:

A normal dev team: "oh look, whenever ship X spawns, the server crashes. How about I just turn off the ability to spawn ship X."

Crobbits team of modders: "do wop woah diddy dum gently caress you, banned!"

stinch posted:

just another example of sc doing things that have never been done before and hitting problems nobody knew existed.
Being able to control what spawns in a mmo, who could have predicted that would be useful?

Krycek posted:

A normal dev team: "oh look, whenever ship X spawns, the server crashes. How about I just turn off the ability to spawn ship X."

Crobbits team of modders: "do wop woah diddy dum gently caress you, banned!"

Jobbo_Fett posted:

reddit posted:

I created my account at the end of 2016 and after some months of thinking about buying the game in March-April I bought my first ship then played for a while and stopped, waiting for the v.3 to play again.
So as you may know I was just too tired to wait and wanted to start playing but big surprise when I tried to login I saw this message:
This account does not exist or is no longer active.
What can I do besides sending them a message it's been 2 weeks without an answer.
Edit: So as suggested by some of you I double checked my emails it seems that my bank made a refund to my bank account cause they thought it was a fraud obviously I never saw the email warning me about this and that’s why they took down my account. Thanks anyway for all your support I really appreciate it.

My bank thought this was a scam. I taught them a lesson and spent that money on the same fraud as before!

peter gabriel posted:

When your banks security algorithms recognise Star Citizen as a scam you really need to stop and think about all this poo poo

peter gabriel posted:

Hey guys my bank thinks this is a scam how do I get round that rather than take a long hard look at things?

VictorianQueerLit posted:

"Star Citizen" exists in the realm of the imagination right now. You can't get pissed off at how bullshit it's pay 2 win mechanics are because you can't state with 100% certainty what the specifics of it's mechanics actually even will be. Even though they are obviously bullshit you can technically argue they might not be bullshit. That technicality is all they need.

Like LTI. Nobody even knows how that works but we know backers have paid tens of millions of dollars for the concept. It's pay2win bullshit but backers live in that little area of the brain that makes you go "Well we don't know for certain it will be bullshit, and here is all of the ways it could not be bullshit." They won't get angry because they don't want to which is a luxury of the state of the product and it having no firm definition of anything at any level.

All of that falls apart when there is a game though.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

If CIG is smart enough to take out a payday loan to play the currency market somehow then I trust them with my savings.

A $2,700 space ship bond will have 400% growth in value, just ask MoMA! You'd be stupid not to buy!

peter gabriel posted:

Don't use Star Citizen as a bank, looking at the Twitch views you'll see it has a very very low interest rate

cool new Polack jokes posted:

OP, thread is getting hard to read (reading the page while the images and stuff load is making it jump around)- any chance you can break up future posts into smaller chunks?

You are doing God's work by the way- keep it up

BloodyScab posted:

god i'd rub anyone to read the amd letter

TheAgent posted:

I have a p good feeling we will see the AMD letter by the end of 2018 or 2019

there's some serious people sniffing around, and I don't mean gaming sites n stuff

Saladin Rising posted:

quote:

If the rings spin off due to collisions with player ships, that would be because the rings are created as physics objects (which makes them conserve momentum during collisions), and are configured with a preposterously small amount of mass relative to the ships. It would be incredibly stupid to make those rings physics objects at all. They should be normal game objects with normal colliders which basically give them infinite intertia (think Doom-style walls).

This is yet more evidence for me that CIG has massively downscaled all objects in the game world. An example would be, if a humanoid model is ususllay 1 CryEngine unit in FarCry, making a human 0.001 unit and scaling everything relative to that would effectively make your level 1000x bigger. 1 meter turns into 1km.

Of course, any loving freshspawn game developer right out of college looking for apples on the coast knows not to do this, because it breaks your physics engine (everything acts like it doesn't have enough mass) and it fucks with collisions (because collision detection is only accurate down to roughly the centimeter depending on how fast the object is moving and what your framerate is). Any of that sound familiar?

That's why I always rail on the SC devs. They appear to have made almost every possible rookie mistake in the book and they don't seem to be fixing any of it, just building more floors on top of the burning wicker foundation which was built on a landfill which once was a sacred Native American burial ground.

Star Citizen is fundamentally doomed and will, imo, never be salvaged into a playable game.

I love posts like this, it's cool to see the plausible "under the hood" explanations as to why everything in Star Citizen is so hosed.

It also reinforces that no amount of "tweaking" will be able to solve problems like this, the fuckup is something that's at a base level, and you'd have to literally start from scratch to "fix" it.

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

Disco Lando posted:

Help Needed: Favorite Moments in Star Citizen's Development
Greetings Citizens,

Nothing formal. Nothing official. But today as we celebrate today's 5th birthday of the original announcement, I thought it'd be fun to see what you guys thought were your favorite moments from Star Citizen's development.

Now, this can be anything. A clip from a show. A particular patch or feature. A reveal or moment from a live event. Whatever moments stand out for you from the last five years.

Of course, in addition to sharing yours, don't forget to vote for others that you agree with.

Thanks!

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Star Citizens.

top reply -



time is a flat circle, star citizen thread.

Mokinokaro posted:

Someone needs to post the clip of CRoberts trying to demonstrate the game he'd obviously never seen before in that thread.

That was for sure a precious moment of SC development.

https://youtu.be/ZWq8ynUq7wM?t=201

Gravity_Storm posted:

The truth is that Star Citizens biggest release was done by Disco Lando accidentally.

Mr. Carlisle posted:

I love citizen con because every year they show just enough made up bullshit on powerpoint slides to keep that sweet sweet whale blubber flowing for yet another year

The Titanic posted:

You realize coming up with these ideas is very hard. Chris Roberts can only have so many award winning genius ideas in a life time.

WW2 in space is very hard to pull off. Especially since your atmosphere is very 1940’s, but your hidden technology is space-age.

Like your people have guns that shoot bullets, and everybody hard loads cargo in crates, but inside the ship is liquid gravity. Nobody weaponized it though because they can’t advance outside of WW2 in space. So the gravity goo is taken for granted.

Chris Roberts is a visionary. If only he had programming talent to layer in the basic code on these ideas. He’s like a genius without a pen to write down all these ideas on.

I’m already looking forward to his next masterpiece. Which may be a space game in a highly advanced world but everybody in it is low tech, possibly like WW2 except in space.

shrach posted:

I'm going to point out one error/mistake in the CIG accounts per day.

1.) Geography

In a consolidated set of accounts for a group of companies you eliminate intra-group transactions. This makes sense, because if you sell goods and services between two companies in a group you would just have matching revenue in one company and cost in the other. So in the CIG UK group, you can ignore the revenue in F42, this has an equal expense in CIG UK that you also ignore. You can then ignore the revenue in CIG UK, since this has an equal expense in RSI UK that you also ignore. Essentially you will just be left with the development costs in F42 and the revenue in RSI UK.

RSI UK has one customer. This is Roberts Space Industries, Corp based in the USA. We know that RSI UK invoices in dollars, because they have exchange losses/gains. We know they don't charge VAT, because they are issuing invoices in dollars to an American company and there is no VAT timing liability on the balance sheet. So we know that the CIG UK group has 100% of its turnover generated in the United States. The accounts however claim that 100% of turnover is attributable to the UK.

These disclosures are typically generated like this by default in an accounting package and it would be up to the accountant to make a manual adjustment to ensure it is correct. It only really affects the overall image of the company rather than any financial implications. If a UK group has 100% turnover in the UK it doesn't really merit any further thought. If a UK group has 100% turnover in the USA it would make it more obvious that delving deeper showed the entire corporation had one customer and that it was a related party with an almost identical name to one of the UK companies.

If you're curious why the 2015 comparative figures don't match, that will be a future error/mistake.

shrach posted:

Today's accounting error/mistake.

2.) Balance(s) brought forward.

Here I present extracts from three sets of accounts. Roberts Space Industries International 2015 and 2016 and also the Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd 2016 (consolidated).

All three sets of accounts break down the balance due to Roberts Space Industries Corporation as at 31 December 2015. They all agree that the balance was £4,120,206 due and that costs charged in the period were £15,310,157. All three differ however in the amounts that were settled and that were brought forward from 2014.

At first glance, this would seem to be of little importance. The CIG 2016 group accounts are actually the same as the RSI 2016. While RSI show a bfwd balance of zero, the CIG set are a consolidated amount of zero and of negative £239,987. Ordinarily when preparing the 2016 accounts the 2015 comparatives would be generated automatically from the previous year. This would suggest that the RSI 2015 is the correct breakdown and both sets of 2016 accounts are wrong.



These related party transaction disclosures are usually edited manually, which to me suggests the accountant here is...perhaps not as attention to detail oriented as they could be. My personal opinion is that if you are charging a client some ~£48,000 for two years of accounts, you don't make basic errors like this. All the client gets to show for your work is 20 sheets of paper, stapled together. So you should always make sure all the sheets are stacked perfectly before and after stapling. You should take a similar level of scrutiny to what is actually printed on the paper.

There is actually a more serious reason this discrepancy and ones like it are annoying and there is a huge "mistake" that is "hidden" here, but I'll revisit this later.

shrach posted:

Today's accounting error/mistake

3.) Debits and Credits.

Knowing your debits from your credits may be hard for your first week but this should become pretty ingrained as part of the core of double-entry bookkeeping.

It's pretty simple. A credit in the profit and loss account is a "good" thing, it increases profit. The corresponding debit in your balance sheet is a "good" thing, it will represent an asset. So a debit value in your profit and loss account will be a "bad" thing that reduces your profit and the corresponding credit in your balance sheet is a "bad" thing that will represent a liability.

So if you make a foreign currency exchange gain, it should be apparent that it will be a "good" thing in your profit and loss account that increases your profit. Thus a credit balance.

So here, you can see the wording is correct in the 2015 RSI accounts. In 2016 someone just had to add "(gains)/." to the line where it says, "Exchange losses". Instead they added brackets around the word losses and then added in the gains/ without brackets. This is painful to see because of both how basic the error is and how they had to go out of their way to make the error. I included the line from the CIG UK Ltd 2016 (group) accounts just to show it is possible to get this correct.



This has no real numerical impact but this is building on the narrative about the quality of the preparation of the 2016 RSI accounts, which is some foreshadowing.

shrach posted:

Today's accounting error/mistake is the final one. It builds on the ones that were previously highlighted but this is actually more a series of deliberate decisions. I'm struggling to find a generously innocuous word that conveys making deliberate decisions that are possibly not correct.

4.) Prior year adjustments.

At some point a set of accounts will be filed that are incorrect. Humans can make mistakes. I'll give an example. Say in 2015 a client paid you in cash for £1000 and you accidentally lost the sales receipt and accidentally banked the money in your personal bank account instead of the company bank account. Later on in 2016, the client asks for a receipt and this helps you remember this event. You're now faced with three options.
(i) You could file an amended set of accounts for 2015 that makes corrections. This seems intuitive and I'm sure textbooks and "experts" online will tell you this is the right thing to do. No one ever files amended accounts. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why, but it doesn't happen.
(ii) You can "do nothing". This doesn't really mean you do nothing. It means when you file the 2016 accounts, you add on those £1000 sales that were really in 2015 and you pay the company back the cash from your personal account. So now the company is declaring that missing income, albeit in the wrong period.
(iii) You make a prior year adjustment to the 2015 figures in the comparative when you compile the 2016 accounts. You disclose all of these items and you can file an amended tax return, without adjusting the 2015 accounts themselves.

The UK CIG group were faced with such a situation. Here is the disclosure in the Foundry 42 Ltd accounts that explains the decision:



So the original turnover amount was £15,169,773 and it was adjusted to be £12,737,713. A reduction in turnover of £2,432,060. This means they also had to add £2,432,060 to the balance sheet, as a liability. Since they now owed Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd that amount. You can see they did all this correct (since they were owed £83,979 separately, this is netted off against this amount due to CIG UK).




So far this is all correct from an accounting angle. However, the UK group of companies are all irrevocably linked. Because of the way the accounts were filed, we have access to the individual filings for 2015 but not the group accounts. In 2016 we have the accounts for Foundry 42, RSI and the group accounts (but not the individual accounts for the CIG company). We can pretty much recreate the missing sets of accounts.

Here is a summary of the 2015 accounts, as they were originally filed. It should be noted that the linked green items, do not appear in the group accounts. These inter-company transactions cancel each other.



Here is an extract from the 2016 consolidated group accounts. Note the profit for the year 2015 shown as £1,088,498.



So the group profit in my summary differs from the 2015 group profit that is disclosed in the 2016 accounts by £2,432,060. Now we know what that is, it's that prior year adjustment. But nowhere in the 2016 group accounts is any prior-year adjustment disclosed. What is disclosed is that the CIG company profit was the same as filed in 2015 at £265,299 profit.



So now we have a big problem. How can we adjust the summary of the 2015 accounts to correct for this prior-year adjustment. Remember all the linked boxes in my summary that can't be changed individually? If we are reducing Foundry 42s turnover figure by £2,432,060 we also have to reduce CIGs cost of sales by £2,432,060 since that is where the turnover came from. We know that CIG (the company) profit stayed the same though, so we know we have to reduce CIGs turnover, also by £2,432,060. So now we also need to reduce RSIs cost of sales by £2,432,060. All good so far. We know that that RSIs profit remains zero also, because we know the groups profit so we also have to reduce their turnover by £2,432,060 however this goes outside the UK group because this is a refund to Roberts Space Industries Corporation, in the USA. So this is going to be an amount in dollars, so it may not match exactly and we have to rely on the accountants to get this right.

We arrive at a new summary, something like this. Bolded numbers are the figures that have been adjusted:



For some reason, they changed the cost of sales in RSI by adding £239,986 to the costs. I've noted it down as a suspense amount because we have no idea why they did this. So to maintain a zero profit, we need to counter this by adding £239,986 to their revenue. This seems like a leap of faith but our summary now matches the group accounts exactly.

So now the group accounts match our summary there are some implications to this. The UK group derives all its income from RSI International Ltd, which derives all its income from the USA company RSI Corporation. Now we can solve why the 2015 turnover figures don't match and the 2016 ones do match. Note the figure does match our summary for RSI, that we have recreated with our own turnover figure by deduction from the group accounts.



We sort of have to now conclude that there must be two different sets of RSI accounts for them to get this "correct" in the group accounts. The RSI accounts that were filed were never corrected for any prior-year adjustment and yet, there must exist a set of RSI accounts that have been corrected in order to get a set of group accounts that is accurate.

The implications here are decidedly tricky. Back in 2015 the US companies would have presumably filed accounts and tax returns to US authories that claimed a dollar amount of expenses equal to £15.3m. Any audits done at this time, would have confirmation letters and invoices for these amounts. As far as audit trails for this £2.4m refund that would have gone back to the United States, well I hope I have demonstrated that this trail is really unclear for anyone that might investigate it. If it were accidentally paid to the wrong entity and then never declared, there would not be any trail.

So the corrections were handled appropriately in the Foundry 42 Ltd accounts. Adjustments were made and disclosures for those adjustments. They used option (iii) from my opening statement. The CIG accounts are slightly trickier, since we have the company accounts for 2015 and the group accounts for 2016 but we can safely say that some adjustments were made but absolutely no disclosures at all. That is sort of an incorrectly implented option (iii) from my opening statement. The RSI accounts have not had any adjustments made and therefore no disclosures and we have some pretty firm suspicions that there may in fact be two different sets of RSI accounts and they are certainly aware that the filed RSI accounts do not match the RSI accounts used for the consolidation of the group accounts that were filed. So it turns out that there was a hidden fourth option that you will not find in any text books and Chris Roberts has developed new solutions to problems and a way to make money apparently disappear.

I can only imagine the state of the dozen or so American companies that are open to zero public scrutiny.

Unrelated hypothetical paragraph
Imagine your company is sitting on £2.4m in the bank that it should not have, that should be refunded to another company in another country. However, in that country, that company does not know it's due any money from years ago. It was all audited and balances confirmed at that time and it's not asking or expecting any money. However, this company with the money in the bank has to get rid of it to make its books balance, it sure should go to the right place and I'm sure anyone would make certain that the right people get this £2.4m.

So as a disclaimer I should stress that I am in no way suggesting that anything unlawful was actually done here. I guess this highlights the "perils" of having multiple shell companies with regard to nice clean audit trails.

reddit posted:

As I've pointed out before, back in January 2015, Roberts delivered a presentation in which he claimed that not only would the first episode of Squadron 42 be released by Fall 2015, but the full commercial release - meaning SQ42 and the persistent universe / MMO - would happen by the end of 2016. He made this claim at 1:32:06 in this video.
At the time of this presentation, the PU wasn't yet in the alpha stage. He seemed to think that his team could get through all of alpha, get through all of beta, and optimize enough for a decent MMO launch in 2 years, all while concurrently working on a single-player game. By saying this, he demonstrated that he either didn't know what he was talking about, or he was being dishonest. It was probably a combination of the two.
Now, almost 3 years after that presentation, backers still haven't seen a mission demo of SQ42, and the MMO is in alpha with, I'm guessing, another 1-2 years of alpha ahead of them. At this rate, I would be impressed if the first episode of SQ42 gets released by 2020, and the MMO gets released by 2023.

reddit posted:

If Star Wars Battlefront 2 had Star Citizen's community self.starcitizen

"Darth Vader being locked behind a paywall unlocked isn't pay to win. He has his advantages and disadvantages when compared to other characters, he serves a different purpose in matches. It's horizontal progression, not vertical".
"Micro transactions and buying heroes and star cards is a nice addition to the game for people who have more money than time. As not everyone can put multiple hours in a game per week".
"Having gameplay changing items that can be bought with real money in game isn't pay to win. Think about it this way: 1: You meet a player who has been playing Battlefront 2 for a year. 2: You meet a player who payed for all his items. What's the difference?".
"Being able to pay for superior star cards and heroes isn't pay to win. Star Wars Battlefront 2 is a skill based game. Meaning you can beat people who have star cards much better than yours if you have more skill. So arguing that star cards give you an advantage is irrelevant".
"Star Wars Battlefront 2 isn't pay to win as you can unlock everything without paying a cent".

I absolutely love what Chris Roberts is doing and I love star citizen to death. But what I absolutely loving hate is the absolute lack of criticism on ANYTHING CIG does, from the community. This is what happened with the Star Wars Prequels, no one opposed George Lucas when he was making the prequels, and the prequels turned out to be poo poo. Even though I love Star Citizen, I will not stand for gameplay affecting microtransactions.

FrozenLederhosen posted:

One thing I don't see brought up at all is the fact that these morons are going to go through "release fatigue" where, when it's finally released(hah), there's nothing to be excited about because they've been playing through it piecemeal over an entire decade. Flying in the same spaceship isn't going to suddenly be really fun because they finally added that one goofy feature they promised years ago. It's like paying premium to stay in a resort while they're building it. When it's finally done, there's no awe or surprise. You've already done everything while enduring endless bullshit.

SomethingJones posted:

Around the Verse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxBdyyGx7vM&t=61s
"...and making sure that we can refine that to as small of a list and as concise of a list as what we would consider a MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT, to put that out to PTU and to live"


"...we're gonna review that process, hopefully get a minimal amount of feedback so we can get super close to calling this thing FEATURE COMPLETE"


"...also we've got all sorts of art that had rotations all over the place, we had to go back and make sure that everything was placed properly on the shelves and that we're having all the FINAL STUFF in the game, all the FINAL ASSETS in the build"

G0RF posted:

“Shopkeeper talk” is second only in annoyance to CIG babble about female player characters on the “Grating Bullcrap They’ve Been Talking About Ineffectually for Years” list.

I mean, dayemn — they’ve been futzing around with Shopkeepers unsuccessfully forever, and to no productive end.

What happened to all the exciting work we heard about in early 2016? The highly detailed animations of ship hawking, TV monitor gawking and champagne dreams? The showfloor buzz, the meta-spectacle of in-game ship fetishizing by NPC hucksters in AstroArmada?

Oh, that’s right... All that work that came out of the Great CIG Management Brain Trust Gathering of early 2016 didn’t go into the game... Not that it was wasted, though.

At the time it seemed pretty alarming to hear them openly admitting they didn’t really know what their development priorities for the year were — because they didn’t have a master plan stretching across years, they pretty much reset their development priorities at the start of each new year and at the time of filming, the big wigs hadn’t decided yet.

Then it seemed even more damning after the Brain Trust Get Together in California that Priority One was “let’s get our shopkeeper NPCs in the game loaded up with some highly detailed ship hawking movements so the ship showroom in game at least feels abuzz with excitement...” In a space sim without Mining, Bounty Hunting, Trade, Mercenary work, an Economy, Female Players, a satisfying Flight Model or any kind of combat AI...

But as we now know, it was even worse than that. At this point it’s more plausible that the CIG Brain Trust got together to set their priorities for the year and most of it was about the sort of sizzle reel material they needed to start working on for Q4’s big sales push. And the only things that look remotely like what Jake Ross described in that January of 2016 we’re animations and assets later redeployed for a ship sale commercial in a series of year-end commercials to sell yet more ships in a space sim Mining, Bounty Hunting, Trade, Mercenary work, an Economy, Female Players, a satisfying Flight Model or any kind of combat AI...

And now it’s over a year and a half later, and the AI we’ve heard about for years yet hardly encountered in game is proving a big challenge to implement for Shopkeepers — the benign, passive, generally stationary non-entities that are the absolute flotsam and jetsam of MMO-dom...

—

Just give up, Chris. You lost the plot and with more money than you deserved in a dozen lifetimes you’re fighting for your life to salvage something, anything playable amidst the debris field of the once soaring opportunity fortune granted you. You’ve saturated your potential niche market, milked the hell out of the most gullible, and the deflation of the hope bubble is so violent now it sounds like a 130 decibel whoopy cushion eruption under the rear end of the god of folly.

The spectacle of you and Sandi trying to be cutesy in your lead-in to Burndown every week is absolutely nauseating. The very need to have a weekly show dedicated to ongoing excuse-making as to why you STILL can’t deliver on a nearly year-overdue update on your Year 5 pre-Alpha is bad enough without the glib, chatty wink-winks that kick it off. Each new installment only adds another chapter to the epic tome “Why Chris Roberts is a terrible game developer, project manager and company leader.” If you lack the awareness to not be embarrassed with each new delay and lack the humility to not be ashamed, plant two other people in that chair who might and use you and Sandi’s time in ways more likely to help the project. Like year long vacations or joint resignations.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

I'm loving that the argument that Star Citizen isn't pay to win comes so close to describing how it doesn't even make any sense.

"Honestly the capital ships are so unwieldy they will probably be seen as a burden and everyone will stop using them changing the entire game"

Ha. The advantages people paid for are so terrible that when everyone stops using them they will not be considered advantages anymore. It's funny but it's also complete speculation about a game that doesn't exist yet with mechanics that don't exist and interactions that haven't happened yet between ships that don't exist in an economy that doesn't exist.

You can not say that Star Citizen has no Pay To Win in it because it is the exact definition of it. When you look at a raw exchange of in game assets and currency for money and try to speculate wild hypotheticals to show that there are instances where a player that paid money is not at an advantage over someone who didn't and redefine the definition of what "Win" means you are showing that you want it to not be pay to win, not that it isn't.

G0RF posted:

“I don't think there is any other game that is trying to do as much as we're trying to do. So, degree of difficulty 11, not 10.”

Everything is difficulty level 11 when you’re a dumbass. Even moreso when you’re a dumbass who sees a genius looking back at you in the mirror.

I’ve come to appreciate the true genius of “Around the Verse” and related programming isn’t in the intimate look at Development, for as we see with dozens of abandoned prior efforts and misleading disclosures over the years, the view is anything but privileged or trustworthy.

The true genius of CIG programming is in its metronomic, anondyne normalization / sanitization of their absolute, inarguable developmental dysfunction.

“Burndown” captures that spirit so perfectly, with the agreeable Eric Davis putting a friendly (if somewhat patronizing at times) face on what would otherwise be seen as salt-on-the-wound proof of CIG’s abject inability to overcome the curse of the Frankenengine, to deliver upon the hubristic claims of Chris Roberts, to prioritize the core space sim essentials (designing satisfying game loops, perfecting flight models, fleshing out those basic features pitched five years ago, etc.) and all the rest.

The Sean Tracy NewEgg livestream I dropped in earlier is the same thing. Sean went right on that show and delivered a complete fiction of the present game state with absolutely no hesitation whatsoever, just as his exemplar leader has done for years with bald-faced bullcrap like this, this, and this.

Lies. Massive lies. Constant lies. And continuum of lying so persistent and inescapable it actually becomes immersive.

Normalization of managerial deviance — and pathological public dishonesty is exactly that, CIG — is just as effectively achieved via their programming. The quote above from 10ftC delivered with benign confidence is itself an example of it. The message as delivered is, contrary to all the early bluster and constant mugging confidence, a concession of an anticipated failure to deliver on original scope promises all sugar-coated in Chris’s noxious entitlement. For though he has no plans to deliver what he originally pitched, he has expectations of perpetual subsidy from the chump army to get there, or partly there, or somewhere eventually.

And wherever he’s standing when the money finally runs out will be declared the destination. The journey itself — one of a portly goofball false prophet staggering, stumbling, gasping for breath, leading the exiles through the wilderness without map, compass, or North Star and spouting constant word of the Promised Land over yon horizon — will be declared their promised home and those still following may even believe it. Yet what Chris will no longer enjoy, and indeed what he has already lost, is control of his own narrative. The early years allowed him to project a narrative arc about himself, his game and his studio that was readily believed by most, even many goons, and his claims were repeated breathlessly as fact by the supplicant gaming press eager to amplify hype for the easy clicks.

Those days are long since behind us and they aren’t coming back. The narrative of ascent once so forceful and certain is in now very clearly in terminal decay, a slow downward spiral towards yet another cautionary gaming tale about squandered opportunities and abused trust. About the perils of trusting micromanaging asset fetishists and the tragic, underappreciated virtues of proper scope design and competent project management. Chris had a chance to make history here, perhaps the most opportune chance in this history of gaming. And through deficits of both competence and character, he absolutely blew it, and the price he will pay for his hubris, deceit, greed and stupidity is that the history he could’ve written will instead be written for him.

The best he can hope for at this point is that some salvageable mediocrity survives and that he’s cast as fool in an epic tale of gaming folly. It would be a generous appraisal and it’s more truly stated that any man who profits so handsomely by lying so often for so long is a villain at heart. His only plausible defense is one he lacks the self-awareness and humility to make — that he was lying to himself the whole time, too, and because he so normalized the act of lying to himself, his employees and his backers, and because he drove away the very sorts he needed to call him out, there was no one left to correct him.

SCtrumpHaters posted:

Daztek posted:

Holy poo poo I thought that was just a insane citizen but its a head CIG employee lol.

The Titanic posted:

Right now it’s still an “us vs them” war, but I think it’s starting to lessen. Once the “us vs them” is gone it’d turn into a “players vs CIG” which is what shouhave happened for a long time.

The irony of the situation may be though is that these supporters who were literally insane abt their support to the point they shielded CIG like frothing monkeys around a banana, may have ultimately hurt the final product.

Imagine if you would when CR went out and started doing tons of motion capture instead of actually making a game years ago, if funding basically stopped and people said “no, gently caress you and playing director and your stupid loving Squadron 42 nobody really wants, we want the game we’re spending $$$ on in the way of digital items and purchases.”

Imagine how differently things would have been if that happened, and Chris Roberts was forced to stop being a playboy millionaire and instead try to actually make a game. Instead of a Gary Oldman you’d have a studio full of seasoned programmers working on the actual product.

But hey, got to protect Chris, right? It was totally worth it, I’m sure.

Spiderdrake posted:

AP posted:

If you follow the streamers for any length of time their interest in a ship declines as CIG stops talking about it and moves to the next thing. As CIG stops talking about every ship after it's sale is over and begins hyping the next dumb idea this leads to the Citizens melting older jpgs and buying new ones. Twerk17 recently melted some dumb rear end large battleship thing I forget the name of, for the new base building jpg.

Wait wait.

You can't fly most of these ships and I'm not sure anyone has mentioned the mechanics to even make these ships in game. But you can buy them, obviously, and process your fictional jpeg into some form of currency?

This thread is seriously like a slowly circling motorboat around the greatest wreck in the history of gaming. I know this poo poo is all old to regulars, but I still hit things every week I've been reading that make me sit up and goggle at the screen.

Foo Diddley posted:

Slow_Moe posted:

Maybe the internet has broken me, but that door looks a bit like goatse.

No ring ofc.

Oh man, I totally see it

TheLastRoboKy posted:

Every time they declare "This will shut them up!" and it just doesn't. Then again if they had pattern recognition Star Citizen wouldn't still have backers.

CIG Employee posted:

Also, not to burst your bubble, but you might find Star Citizen to be a terrible first-time job. It's late in a project, the documentation is patchy, no one would have a lot of time to explain things and many systems require you to write code that works with their incomplete feature set while being structured to be easily adapted to their eventual feature set. Then again, what do I know? Maybe that's your bag.

Thoatse posted:

What insures SC will never be a VR experience though is the ridiculously twitchy speeds everything moves/flies at, even the biggest ship instant accelerates and rockets off the pad like it's made of balsa wood and it's not an anomaly. I know no one here believes it, but the flight model isn't actually noclip -it just looks nearly indistinguishable because accel is tuned so loving high but it's exactly what they want in order to appease the kbm shooter crowd this game is really being made for once original sim whales were bled out and became the minority.


Even if they solved the technical issues with framerate, IK/walking rigs, immersion animations, locomotion, canned aim and cover animations etc, they are still left with a game with mechanics that are still incompatible with VR. Also they were pressed on the use of 6dof tracked controllers and they officially ruled out ever supporting them. Really the only way SC sees any type of VR action beyond some lovely vorpx pukeport is if they make a completely separate branch of the game for it that does not mix with the main branch. It's like they took practically every step imaginable to ensure they will never be able to utilize this technology, even if they ever manage to work out the technical side of things that they are not even trying to work on.

Loxbourne posted:

Travis and Chelsea Day were a husband and wife couple, both ex-Blizzard, who came aboard CIG in the early days as funding was taking off like a rocket. Travis was an experienced developer and producer who had worked on both Diablo 2 and 3. Chelsea was a similarly experienced Blizzard customer support manager, making for quite a power couple. Their appointments did much to soothe early backer concern at the runaway stretch goals.

Travis worked as a producer at CIG until June 2015. His solid experience and measured tones on CIG videos did a lot to shore up backer confidence during the long period when Star Marine was "weeks, not months" away. He left quietly, ostensibly to go back to Blizzard. A certain amount of backer unease followed his departure.

Chelsea on the other hand became a community icon, a regular on CIG's videos and the face of the customer support unit's concierge team. She became popular with backers for quick, friendly responses and above all being willing to hook whales up with rare and valuable ships if they missed a sale. In those days that was ships like the Idris-M and Scythe. Chelsea's popularity stemmed from the way she wouldn't just grant refunds for these rare and expensive ships, but she would put a refunded ship back in "stock" and let another backer buy it if they asked.

Being a CS rep, and also being a feeeeeehmale, this brought her to the attention of CIG's truly wonderful and caring fanbase

Some of the first rumblings of disquiet on these forums started when Chelsea began to share stories about the kind of people who kept calling up the customer support teams and asking very inappropriate questions - including, yes, the infamous backer who apparently kept asking for video footage of the female CS team members' feet. This was the time "The Wulge" got his nickname from apparently having a habit of sending the CS team dick picks long before he targeted fellow players. Goons began to joke about how CIG were clearly longing for release day so the community managers wouldn't have to suck up to whales and could start purging the creeps. Sadly these days we know better.

Alas, Chelsea's popularity with the backer base also put her in the sights of people who simply could not tolerate sharing the spotlight. These were also the days when attractive female CS reps who appeared in CIG videos had a nasty tendency to disappear if they drew too much viewer attention away from the High Queen of Marketing. The exact details aren't known, but the body language in the videos spoke volumes - spoke them so loudly that even the backers began to pick up on it and ask questions on the RSI forums. In one video (I think an anniversary stream or something; it was an all-hands team thing) Chelsea was spotted visibly rolling her eyes as Sandi spoke, and after that the writing was on the wall. She left at the same time as her husband, again going back to her old job at Blizzard.

Chelsea is still fondly remembered by the backers to this day, particularly those who bought in at concierge level. Quite a few complaints and concern threads (and more than a few refund requests) have cited how later customer services teams are "nowhere near as good as Chelsea".

Chelsea would be replaced for a few months by another female deputy customer services rep, supposedly a "Deputy Head of Marketing" - a woman who would in turn depart during a purge of suspected leakers around the time of the AEGIS Potato debacle, when someone leaked the name of an upcoming new ship just prior to CitizenCon only for CIG to frantically rename it to try and discredit the leak. Someone left a placeholder up on the website and the CIG store proudly began selling the "AEGIS POTATO" until someone typed the new name in.

TheAgent-sourced (and Bootcha-supported) rumours said she quit on the spot in disgust after witnessing her colleagues being fired by Sandi for refusing to hand over their mobile phones to CIG's private detective agency so they could be checked for leaks.

After that Sandi began tweeting about training a new CS team in Europe en masse, the same people who would turn out to be running the ticket queue that labelled backers as "snowflake" or "goon" and cross-referenced them with their suspected usernames on other sites. But the saga wasn't over yet!

In early 2016, perhaps in a sharing mood or perhaps in a moment of drunken weakness, Bootcha let slip a little more info from his time as a CIG investor. We knew that after Derek's first spectacular leaks, Ortwin and Chris panicked and brought in a private detective agency (hired with backer money) to try and flush out the leakers. Apparently their report fingered none other than...Travis Day.

We'll never know if Travis really was a source of some early leaks (Bootcha's comments were pretty sceptical and suggested he thought that the agency were just trying to find a patsy to justify their fee), but again the reasoning told us all we needed to know. Supposedly, the reason they considered Travis the most likely leaker was that he had a motive to seek revenge on Sandi for her poor treatment of his wife.

Truly, Cloud Imperium Games is a wonderful working environment.

Loxbourne posted:

One more one!

"Moved to Concern"

A nasty little trick popular with moderators on the old RSI forums. To defuse rising backer angst, Lesnick & co created a "concern" subforum for angry backers to post about things that bothered them about Star Citizen. This kept them out of more public-facing forums where backers might be put off buying ships. Needless to say, any thread expressing dissatisfaction with Star Citizen (or even one where the conversation turned in a heretical direction) would be swiftly yanked from the public eye and moved to the Concern forum.

However once moved to Concern, the other shoe would drop. There were very strict rules about threads created in the Concern forum, one of which was that all threads had to have a poll so Citizens could vote on whether or not they felt the thread highlighted a major issue (and other laws about speaking respectfully etc). A thread created elsewhere would of course not meet the requirements...and so be immediately locked. Sometimes the hapless thread OP would be banned, too.

Backers quickly learned not to create threads that could even potentially be deemed concern threads, lest they be banned by association. A rather grim and pathetic culture sprang up whereby a backer raising a concern would feel the need to start their post with two or three paragraphs reaffirming their support for the project and their loyalty to CRoberts, lest the mob descend and an RSI moderator wade in to brand the thread with the mark of Concern.

This trick became no longer necessary when the fanbase was unceremoniously moved to Spectrum in mid-2016 and the old RSI forums were "archived" and quietly deleted. Spectrum came with a full suite of mod tools enabling a moderator to make a heretical thread (or even a user's entire post history) disappear with a click of a button, and angry backers all moved to Reddit instead.

IcarusUpHigh posted:

shill site posted:

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU PLAY
Every Star Citizen trailer features 100% in-engine content using actual game assets. Our aim is to show you the game we’re building, not to stun you with pre-rendered cutscenes. With the attention to detail we’re putting into Star Citizen’s world, you’re forgiven if the two seem like one and the same.

reddit posted:

reddit posted:

To be honest... And I'm saying this as a first-round crowdfunding contributor who has been following this project since its conception in 2011... You sound like someone in a cult. You've been promised so much, and there's been so much hype, but all we have right now are a few tiny tech demos and a bunch of promises. This game was funded six years ago, has raised over $150 million, and still hasn't been released, with no clear release date in sight. I've been watching the progress from day one, with so much excitement and eagerness. I've been right there beside you all, saying "when will it be ready?" and waiting to jump into my ship and sail the cosmos. But I feel... disenchanted. The hype train keeps on rolling, but they still haven't stitched things together into a single unit yet. All we've had is a few simple tech demos. The scope of the game keeps changing, and new features are constantly announced, and it seems like development is charging forward... But part of me wonders if they're just selling us smoke and mirrors and living easy on that $150 million.
So, I guess what I'm saying, is the thing I'm most excited for is to actually see this game get released, and to know I didn't waste all that money all those years ago.
I can't possibly say "this will be the only game I need" or that it'll be "everything I've ever wanted," because I honestly don't even know if it'll ever come out, and because I've become wary of all the hype and propaganda.
It feels to me an awful lot like religion... The church telling me "spend your life dedicated to our cause and tossing your money into our coffers, and you'll have a boundless and beautiful reward when the rapture comes." Heaven will be the "only thing I need," and it'll be "everything I've ever wanted..." Except I'll never see it in my lifetime, and I won't be able to call home after I'm dead to tell you whether it lived up to all the hype.
I feel jaded. I've lost faith in RSI just like I lost faith in Jesus. Thankfully, Star Citizen has the potential to actually be released in my lifetime and to prove me wrong, whereas Jesus can't make the same claim. So, I guess I could say that I have more faith in RSI than I do in Jesus... But only a little.
I can't wait for this game to be released. Not because I'm super excited to play it, but because I'm just so ready for the stress of waiting to be over. Even if it sucks and we've all wasted our money, at least we'll have closure.

Beet Wagon posted:

peter gabriel posted:

Star Citizen has the potential to actually be released in my lifetime and to prove me wrong, whereas Jesus can't make the same claim

I rolled away the rock Ben after three days and it turns out Star Citizen was still dead, actually

Dogeh posted:

Goon 2:5 And in the beginning of the ELE, all was good in the Star Citizen community. The whales were brought forth and did purchase of the jpegs in copious amounts. The people asked 'Was Star Citizen good?' and the Shills replied 'Yea verily, for unto you a ship is born and it shall be called Idris and you will land the ship on many moons of your choice' and the people were glad.

Goon 2:6 But in all the lands did a darkness dwell. For hidden from the people, a great untruth was lying. And people knew it not. The base god of the people had maketh a falsehood and had told the people that Star Citizen was good and that they should buyeth of it, and that he would finish it, in fidelity. The fidelity was to be good and the fidelity was to be real.

Goon 2:7 But lo, a great prophet came at that time and his name was Derek. Derek was the counting of his name and the people were mightily puzzled. 'Derek', they cried, 'whence come thee to this land of darkness?'

Goon 2:8 And the Derek replied "Oh great people for whom doth thou not knowest the truth, verily this day an evil lies in the land and you can read about it in my July blog'. And the people did readest of the July blog and it took them many days for Derek was not light of typing.

Goon 2:9 But gradually the people knew of the blog and they knew Derek. But yet, there were those who had not taketh of the blogs and they were mightily afraid.

Goon 2:10 They had come from a far off place, a land where darkness walked in perpetuity, called r/ds. They greatly envied his genitals and spoketh about them in hushed tones.

Goon 2:11 "Oh Derek," they cried, "Why are thy genitals so superior to ours?". And Derek smiled on them and blocked them.

Goon 2:12 Then it came to pass, that the owner of the land of r/ds, a man called Jester, did tire of the people from r/ds, and closed off the land to others. Derek was mightily pleased and shouted gaily, "I closed those rear end-clowns down."

Goon 2:13 And the people from r/ds did gnash their teeth and wail epithets at the prophet and he smiled all the more.

Beet Wagon posted:

reddit posted:

after the exchange i had with the backers in the past few day i kinda dont even give a poo poo anymore. I think i will join you guys and discuss all that is to discuss and leave SC behind me.
Problem is even when i want to register i need to pay 10 dollars. Or do i understand something wrong?

I'm the man who put $250 into Star Citizen but can't afford a $10 forums account.

Honestly it's probably for the best, there's no way in hell the thread doesn't rip Fandred apart like a pack of dingoes with a fresh baby.

The Titanic posted:

Fandred1 is learning that it’s not goons or Derek who make CIG look like a comedy and a bad studio, it’s CIG.

Pretty sure nobody here can wave a wand and say, “abracadabra, no progress for 6 years and no game to show for it, but tons of YouTube content and aimless merchandising!” Unless really Mel Brooks is here because he could probably do that.

Loxbourne posted:

I just want to see Fandred crossing the border like a proper Cold War defection. Huge concrete wall, rain-slick streets, signs in a strange Xi'an language, sinister men in trenchcoats giving the signal.

Then he's over the barbed wire and running. Alarms blare and searchlights spark up, oh no! Gunshots ring out! Then the entire border guard force suddenly clip through their own guard towers and collapse spasming.

Derek and Beer adjust their long grey coat collars and smuggle him into a basement full of angry, dancing cats. They send the codeword - defector secure. Crack teams of refunders swing into action. By the next morning, Fandred's been smuggled into Prague hidden in the bottom of a crate of Wing Commander memorabilia and his refund has been laundered through a dozen offshore investment accounts from Siberia to Madagascar.

Shhh, shhh, you're safe now. Another freed from the long shadow of the Crobbler.

G0RF posted:

glassdoor posted:

Former Employee - Network Engineer in Houston, TX

— Doesn't Recommend
— Negative Outlook
— Disapproves of CEO

I worked at Cloud Imperium Games full-time (More than 3 years)

Pros
Really cool company to work for and everyone wants to talk to you about it. Have some great equipment especially stuff donated from Amazon.

Cons
My job wasn't really needed at the stage in the project I was hired, and won't be needed for quite some time. My advise was taken but not listened to, and more senior people were posted above me from other departments with absolutely no history of networking - like art / marketing

Well friend, that’s because Cloud Imperium Games isn’t a gaming studio, it’s a company whose core business model is now and has always been the marketing and selling of high-poly spaceship assets or even more desirably the promise of them. It is led by a troika of amoral family members who are hopelessly unfit to lead a 2017-era gaming studio yet uniquely gifted at rationalizing their opportunistic financial exploitation of a credulous customer base and considerably proficient at employing cinematic propaganda to achieve those ends. So effective have they been at the unthinkable that their core financiers are now more invested in playing a psychosocial game — that being one of ritualized anticipation of the next ship sale, the next fan conference, the next TV show — than in playing the previously promised actual game.

Had they been making that from the start, well, you might’ve been a valued employee rather than a whiny packet nerd forced to report to a management-tier compromised of a hangars-on society of longtime Hollywood cronies and even longer-time game industry friends from a bygone era in which the founder was relevant. Oh, and his wife, who lacks the talent to have even been either.

SomethingJones posted:

CIG are to an extent making Derek's involvement and blogs about Star Citizen redundant, as they consistently continue to demonstrate ineptness, incompetence and greed all on their own.

The Titanic posted:

quote:

This is hilarious because I’ve been saying in my blog about how CIG stopped caring about a year ago and here it is. You can almost pinpoint the exact spot where they gave up trying to make a game.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

You see if you consider having no direction, no plan, no goals and no destination to be "Trail Blazing" then they are in fact good things.

Sure you might be wandering into a million miles of wilderness with no supplies but if you tell everyone that you are blazing a trail then you are actually so admirable you are above all criticism.

ComfyPants posted:

idiodic waterslide metaphor on reddit posted:

Actually it's more like they wanted to show everyone how cool the water slide was going to look so they could sell more season tickets, so they threw together some plywood they found in the garage and piled it up into precarious 5 story behemoths that were in no way riveted together, showing off what the BDWSE would look like by making the piles look vaguely water-slide-shaped and painted to look real pretty.

After the cash rolled in they decided that instead of building the real water slides, they would make intricate CGI demos of what the water slides would be like and make commercials about the water slides and draw water slides and show everyone the pictures so they'd buy more tickets.

Then one day a ticket holder noticed that they'd spent several thousand dollars on tickets but still hadn't yet actually slid down one yet, so the water slide company figured SOMEONE should get to work on those slides so they sent a few guys over to the park to finish assembling the slides that were already precariously erected on the site, but because they weren't screwed together yet, whenever somebody went up to the top to start work on fastening everything together, it would fall down, and then they'd have to rebuild the whole thing all over again, and the guy running the operation demanded that nobody use any rivets or screws or bolts until all of the slides were put up so every time someone started trying to rivet the things together, they would just collapse again.

Soon, it was apparent that they would need a lot more people to hold up all the plywood to get it ready to be bolted together, but a lot of people decided not to stick around because they had degrees in engineering and dreams of building great water slides and all they were doing were drawing pictures of swimming trunks, and were appalled at the lovely management at the waterslide company, and plus a lot of the plywood that fell down ended up being damaged and they had to keep buying more, until suddenly someone looked around and said hey we don't have any money left because we spent it all on commercials CGI and broken plywood and we haven't even thought about how we're going to run water to the property, and build the pipes.

Somewhere along the line, someone bought advance tickets and he'd built some water slides in the past for very niche water slide enthusiasts, and looked at the progress that wasn't being made and said, "You know, I know a thing or two about water slides and I don't think they can pull this off," and the the CEO of the BDWSE spent hours yelling, "gently caress you gently caress you gently caress you you don't get to ride ANY of my water slides here's your money back," so that guy has spent 2 1/2 years standing outside the water park complex with a bullhorn yelling, "YOU'RE NEVER GETTING THIS poo poo BUILT," and meanwhile die hard fans of the water park who have been hit way too many times in the head by falling plywood have been chucking paper wads at him and built a rickety shack outside the waterpark where they put up a sign saying "THE GUY WITH BULLHORN IS A DOO DOO HEAD" and yelling about how great the waterpark is going to be while watching entire stacks of plywood collapse around them until the person who ran the shack decided to take the shack and go home and declare victory over the bullhorn man.

It's more like that.

Pantsbird posted:

I could almost understand that mentality if CiG was marching in a straight line. With no plan, and grande nerd money, they might end up somewhere nice by accident. Heck, even a random drunken walk would get them further away from their starting position.

Either case would be better than walking in circles, retracing steps. Using a rope to swing across a chasm, only to trek back around the long way so they can retrieve the rope, then head home to get a better rope. The rope is too heavy, so they brought a ladder. The ladder is too short to cross the chasm. Stopping frequently to meticulously etch pebbles into detailed, microscopic figures. This one is a whale, that one a turtle, and those thirty-seven are busts of the crew members on the ship you'll build after crossing the desert, to sail to El Dorado. The intrepid explorers start digging for the ores and the fuels that will make the sharper tools that will carve the even more lifelike figures, and for the gems that will bring them to life. The stones chip too easily, so the party moves on.

Foo Diddley posted:

A Neurotic Corncob posted:

a cargo/trading "gameplay loop" is featured in whatever this segment is now: https://youtu.be/rbC1OmEB-nE?t=4m

Wow, I can't wait to trade all kinds of goods between Port Olisar and... uh...

Well anyway, I'm sure it will be amazing and not a boring tedious grind like Elite

The Titanic posted:

The longer CIG keeps tugging people around by their noses, the more people will eventually widen up. I’d still like to think there are intelligent people out there, and some of them are caught up in this silly Derek war, but when it comes down to it, the product their defending isn’t getting better and the promises keep coming, and yesterday’s promises keep getting further back...

I don’t believe that people can be fooled infinitely. And I know some can, but not over something like a video game. Especially not where the biggest hype it generates constantly is “guess what you can buy next?!”

I think that as people “wake up” to the reality of the situation, they’re going to need to cope with it. Their first instinct probably isn’t going to be “wow I was really wrong and fooled!” It’s going to be more subtle, wherein they “saw it coming but decided to hold out for good measure” and “knew what they were getting into but hoped for the best”.

There will be lots of straws to break camel backs with, don’t worry.

If anything, we’ll have front row tickets to seeing lots of coping mechanisms at work over a fairly petty item. A video game isn’t really something somebody needs to have psychological help over, though it’s possible some people are getting close (some may already have passed it).

But I also think that CIG is taking such a long time to fail that it’s not going to be hard for people to unplug and come to terms. It’s not a sudden thing, but gradual. People will be fine, and at the end of it there will be new friendships and new jokes to laugh at. Eventually everybody splits up and CIG is a cornerstone of how not to crowdsource a video game, or possibly any product.

SomethingJones posted:

They have 68 vacancies on their website, they've been throwing up job ads on Glassdoor and Indeed.co.uk like crazy over the last few weeks, THEY CANNOT HIRE FOR poo poo and it's completely obvious


Look at this - this is a single job listing for multiple roles, all posted today (Nov 20):
http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/jobs/cloud-imperium-game-recruiting-multiple-opening-59/

Senior Producer – Marketing
• Support the VP, Marketing on the coordination and execution of all global marketing initiatives.

Lead Character Technical Artist
• Work in a team along with the Technical Director of Content, Character Art Director, Lead Technical Artist and Animators to ensure quality and performance are met across all character assets and their development processes

Gameplay Engineer – Service & Backend

Character Artist

Technical Designer

Network Programmer
Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire – UK

Graphic Designer
Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire, UK



And then there's this, posted on Oct 27:
http://www.develop-online.net/interview/recruiter-hot-seat-cloud-imperium-games/0212944

Recruiter Hot Seat: Cloud Imperium Games

How many staff are you looking to take on?

The numbers will increase with the demands of the project, but currently we’re looking to hire upwards of 60 staff across multiple departments in our four international studios of Los Angeles (USA), Austin (USA), Manchester (UK) and Frankfurt (Germany). Some positions are not studio specific although others are; so if anyone is interested they should check out our website for further details.

If anyone who hasn’t done any research on the project then this always comes across the worst. Especially when we are so transparent in our development and have so much information readily available online. After those, people usually fall down due to poor punctuality, bad communication skills or a lack of confidence.




They threw up the animator vacancies on VFXexpress on November 1st:
http://vfxexpress.com/node/61

Senior Animator
Frankfurt, DE

Animator:
Frankfurt, DE

Lead Animator:
Frankfurt, DE

Senior Animator: Manchester, UK

Animator Manchester, UK

Motion Editor: Manchester, UK

Lead Animator: Manchester, UK

Facial Animator: Derby, UK



They can't even hire audio guys despite having vacancies listed for the entirety of 2017 - this is CRAZY. As well as advertising for audio people in the usual audio job sites look how completely desperate they are (posted Oct 13):
Tweet Summary: #JOBS : @CGJob : Cloud Imperium Game Recruiting Lead & Sr Sound Designerhttp://www.cgmeetup.net/home/jobs/cloud-imperium-game-recruiting-lead-sound-designer-senior-sound-designer/ … #audio #sounddesign



And finally you can see the amount of vacancies that appeared literally in the last few weeks (some in the last few days) on JobsNeo:
http://www.jobsneo.com/cloud-imperium-games-jobs


I can only speak for myself but I see a lot of people walking away from this project - both devs and backers. This is evidenced by:
- the funding chart
- the refunds sub
- posts on Spectrum & SC subreddit
- the state of production, ie what they are putting out to Evocati
- the increase in job vacancies on CIG's website
- the increase in job listings sites being used by CIG
- the increase in recruitment sites being used by CIG



They're sunk.

SomethingJones posted:

Backers are leaving and getting refunds, staff are leaving and CIG can't fill the vacancies, the funding is going down - there's no other way to say it or interpret it, it's clear and straightforward. You can draw a straight line through everything CIG have produced and said and failed at over the last 2 years to arrive at this point. It was inevitable and predictable and here it is right now. No surprise, no drama. Just another failed kickstarter that very few people outside of a shrinking subreddit give any fucks about.

That senior marketing role not being filled says a lot about Sandi, and the way the job description is written says even more about her. That's another job you wouldn't be able to do because of the incompetence and inexperience directly above you.

SomethingJones posted:

SCtrumpHaters posted:

*This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by the content owner.*
this loving sound design. like roaches in your ear

It's loving awful.
The static atmospheric audio sounds like an Amiga game, the little pulsing whiny noise is tiny and tinny and lovely and spiky, and the triggered jet engine sample phases with the atmospheric sound.

Not even amateur hour level, it's pure crap.

Quavers posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/7eh7v3/30_spoilers_5th_evocati_qa_update/

Q: How’s the FPS lately?
A: I’ve been getting a wide range of frames lately. From as low as 7 FPS in a full server to 65 FPS in a fresh server, my average FPS is about 30 in a 60 player server. To me, that’s a significant improvement from 2.6.3.

Q: How are NPCs coming along?
A: They’re still confined to the player hubs, but they make the hubs feel alive especially Levski. The shopkeepers make comments while you browse and shop, and the space ATC guy sounds like a good guy to hang out with. NPC ships only appear during missions AFAIK. Miles and Ruto are at Levski and GrimHex, respectively, but they’re not enabled yet.

Q: How are the bikes and rover handling now?
A: The Dragonfly is working much better than the Nox lately, while the Ursa rover is much more stable than the bikes. The Dragonfly does better in off-road terrain while the Nox works best on smooth surfaces like the race track at Deakins Outpost. The Nox still tends to flip on its side and turning with the Nox is like riding a stallion without a saddle. There’s still the issue of collision with both bikes and the rover. With the bikes, hitting a boulder on the moon surface sends you flying into the air and flipping uncontrollably. With the Ursa rover, it jumps upward when hitting obstacles and flips over. Parking the bikes into ships is still tricky where they move erratically trying to conform to the larger ship’s internal grid. Parking the rover inside the Connie is less problematic than the bikes, but it tends to slip through the cargo bay floor when closing them. That bug needs to be fixed. With Patch X, the bikes can now strafe up and down and they automatically switch from hover mode to flight mode if you can get high enough above the surface.

Q: How’s ship combat? Did they really buff the Gladius?
A: With a “no PVP unless stated otherwise” rule in ETF and no combat focused testing yet, I don’t know. When CIG states we can test combat among each other and combat/escort missions are fixed, I’ll let you know. The Gladius does have 3x size 3 weapon mounts in 3.0.

Quavers posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/16270-Claiming-Space-The-Race-For-Land

Claiming Space: The Race for Land

blah blah blah blah

Recently, there has been a major push to encourage the settlement and development of the Empire’s frontier. As part of this initiative, the PDB has been making additional parcels of land accessible to the public for purchase. It is believed by policymakers that as sectors become more developed, they likewise become more secure. Statistics from recent studies show that it is significantly harder for outlaws and Vanduul raiding parties to gain purchase in UEE-controlled systems when there are settlers and companies with vested interests in ensuring the protection of that territory. Combine this with Consolidated Outland’s recent introduction of a self-contained colonization platform, and many are expecting to see a new golden age of land development in the second half of the 30th century.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/7el28z/claiming_space_the_race_for_land/

Tokamak posted:

"it's a lore post! it's a lore post!!", i continue to insist as i slowly watch evocati leaks and follow the lead up to the holiday sale

Loxbourne posted:

VictorianQueerLit posted:

Hmm, seems like the obsession with Derek and Line of Defense has an almost superstitious effect on the faithful.

Their behaviour is governed by a simple rule, but like single-celled lifeforms and early computer programs, the interaction of large numbers of iterations of a simple rule can produce the illusion of complexity.

Essentially, there are two categories in a serious cultist's mind. GOOD and BAD. Star Citizen is GOOD. Derek Smart is BAD. These two categories are ironclad and never the twain shall meet.

The word "scam" is a BAD thing. But saying "Star Citizen is a scam" makes the cultist lock up; Star Citizen can only be GOOD. Things of the Smart are BAD, therefore anything BAD must be associated with Derek Smart even if CIG are doing it. Otherwise the cultist's brain throws an exception and that hurts.

So Derek must be scamming, because scamming is in the BAD category and Derek is in the BAD category. So the cultist shouts as loudly and as often as possible that Derek is the real scammer because otherwise the cognitive dissonance hurts too much. The most flimsy and ridiculous evidence is marshalled to support this, and other cultists flock to agree because that way they can reassure one another that the rightful order is being upheld. This pattern extends to all possible BAD concepts, like refunds and awkward questions and filthy leavers. It's why the cultists are so obsessed with saying that refunds are actually people scamming CIG. They can understand refunds are BAD and scams are BAD and Derek is BAD, and all these concepts blend together because their critical thinking skills have atrophied so badly they genuinely can't tell the difference anymore. Someone who wants a refund instantly goes into the BAD category and must be a scammer and a goon and a shill and a Derek alt and a spy for Big Publishing and probably a terrorist and a communist too. That's why you get these ridiculous frothing accusations aimed at Derek that read like the citizen has just banged their keyboard and written down every possible bad thing they could come up with. They genuinely have just written down a list of evil-sounding concepts, and in their minds Derek is all of them at once.

This goes the other way as well; it fuels the dreams. Star Citizen is GOOD, and all the ideas of GOOD in the cultist's head get mixed up with it and become the huge dreaming memeplex we're so familiar with. 1000-player dogfights, handheld cargo, massive capital ship battles and total physical realism are GOOD so SC must have them because it too is GOOD and therefore all GOOD things at once.

I honestly think if Derek was struck by a bolt of inspiration and coded an amazing 1000-player capital ship battles patch for Line of Defence , the cultists would actually start claiming it was really in Star Citizen or Derek had somehow stolen CIG's codebase, just to avoid having to think Derek can do a thing that fell into the GOOD category.

Not every Star Citizen has fallen this far, but the really nasty ones have.

You can model this thread along these lines too, to be honest. Our attitude to Sandi and Chris in particular.

Loxbourne posted:

I genuinely believe that if stressed hard enough, you could get a really-far-gone shitizen to claim that a particularly embarrassing piece of Star Citizen footage is actually from Line of Defence.

Toops posted:

Loxbourne posted:

You can model this thread along these lines too, to be honest. Our attitude to Sandi and Chris in particular.

Right cause we don't have any compelling evidence whatsoever that Sandi and Chris suck poo poo.

SomethingJones posted:

Regardless of the reason underlying CIG's failure to fill these posts, they are competing for talent like everyone else and the project is simply not attracting any. Additionally they have failed to retain the talent that they did have.

In case anyone hasn't worked it out, that job is to create promotional material for in-game items - "Help develop brands within the Star Citizen universe, create logos and visual styles that reinforce the game Lore". The vacancy for that post appears right at the same time CIG announce they will start selling plots of land.

It's a giant scam, selling in-game items without a game and without communicating mechanics attached to those items by way of a spec or a plan or a description. It's a total loving scam from back to front.

Lack of Gravitas posted:

Another day, another red X. Chris looks at the calendar on his wall and counts the ever decreasing number of days he has left until a date circled in red. A date that refuses to be delayed by any amount of bugs, blockers, tasks, or refactors.

Too few days left, he thinks. Why won't they just give me a little extra time, why won't they just listen to reason, why won't they just see what I'm trying to do here.

But The Bank will not budge.

With a sigh, he gets up and walks over to a glass box mounted to the wall, and whispers to himself "I guess this is the emergency," before breaking the glass. He pulls out an envelope, cutting his finger on a shard as he does so.

He opens the envelope and unfolds its contents, and a drop of blood falls onto the paper. For a moment he looks at the drop, and thinks how much he has sacrificed. But it doesn't matter now, for this, this is the jpeg that will save the dream.

Rabelais D posted:

BoredGamer gets a good 25-30k views on his daily videos which are just "And you will be able to do this, and then that, and then this, and you will be able to do this cool thing too" over and over. His audience seems to absolutely adore the stream of consciousness dream diarrhoea.

Someone on here said he is the most credulous man to have ever lived, and that may be the case, but he might be just very clever instead, having found a quick and easy way to make reliable money (plus patreon) simply by verbalising digital space game possibilities for ten minutes every day.

ComfyPants posted:

Hi Cloud Imperium Games. It's apparent than in desperation for more cash, you've been trawling the SA forums for any ideas that will turn a commando upside down and shake the pennies out of their pockets. The selling land thing is loving great, and I can't wait to see this hilarity play out.

I have some other ideas that are guaranteed to be winners and bring you in at least hundreds of dollars and I can't wait for you to rip them off:

Robot butlers: When there's just not enough hours in the day to do space laundry or make space food, a robot butler will come in very handy.
Buy your way into space government: Why be a citizen when you could be a senator? While I'm sure there are already plans to allow citizens to play politics in your game, why not sell off an instant political office so a player can start out with a guaranteed spot in government? A small pledge makes you a senator, a large pledge makes you a planetary governor, and for an extra large fee, you can make your position a lifetime term! Exciting!
Toilet bowl cleaners: We all love taking space shits, but some of us spend too much time cleaning our space latrines. For a small wad of cash, you can get a toilet bowl disc that you can drop straight into the tank, making it so much easier.
Porsches: Not space Porsches, but actual Porsches that commandos can drive on the way to their space job. Who needs a pleb buggy when you can drive to the office in style? They'll be very expensive, but you already know that.
Wankpod Porn: Several nice packages of in-game smut for when you just gotta rub one out before saving the galaxy. Many different varieties to choose from, but the high end package will be nude videos and pics of Chris Roberts. Your fans will make you millions.
Dorka Smerk voodoo doll: Something for your commandos to vent their frustrations out on while they're waiting for your dreams to become reality. In no way shape or form similar to any real game developers.
Planets: Why buy land when you can have your own planet? As we all know, planets are easy. Randomize a seed and just flip the procedural switch and you're good to go. For a princely sum, commandos can outright have their own unique planet to rule with an iron fist.
Goon Detector: When the game finally comes out, all of the goons that haven't died of old age will do what goons do. Since you already have in-depth profiles on everyone including goon tags and snowflake tags, you'll know which players are goons, but the commandos won't! Sell them a goon detector that they can carry around so they can run crying from the first goon that comes close to them. Rip off the design from the "Aliens" motion tracker, that shouldn't be too hard.
Custom lines in Squadron 42: Who wouldn't love to hear Admiral Bishop give his stirring speech but also mention that Commando xxL3aveRoyMoor3Alon3xx is the best pilot in the galaxy? Or Old Man Hamill saying to his friends that you're the most handsome and virile man who ever lived? Or have Cara "Web" Webster calling you by name and offering to give you a handy? Dreams like this and more are worth a lot to lonely shut-in nerds, and they'll pay bank for them.
An in-game copy of Star Citizen and Squadron 42: If you could sell a game twice, why wouldn't you? For a real challenge, players can buy a copy of Star Citizen for their commando to play on their space chariot while playing Star Citizen! They can even buy all the packages all over again! You can also sell an optional Kevlar case for them to put their computer in so it doesn't kill anyone when it explodes.

Please use these ideas to keep the funding rolling so that the insanity never stops.

reddit posted:

I have something that is apparently super rare for trade.
My older sister used to work in the industry so I had like, a million Beanie Babies. They are all in storage now, but she gave me one that she told me to keep safe because it was signed. There were only 200 some odd made, and have apparently sold on ebay for over $7,000.
At this point, as cool as it is to have a rare collectible, it has just been sitting on my dresser in it's protective case for like, 15 years, so I would rather have some cool ships.
If anyone is interested or wants pics shoot me an offer. I will ONLY do this as an in person trade in the central valley area of CA.
It has the hard plastic tag protector on it, has never been removed, it also has been sealed in a hard plastic Ty show case for the last 15 years. Mint condition.
The ships I am most interested in are: Carrack Pheonix Avenger Super Hornet 890 Idirs Retaliator
Would also be open to cash offer.
[/url]

D_Smart posted:

No Star Citizen anniversary live stream this year. Obviously because the much touted, one year late, 3.0 build is completely & flat-out BROKEN; and they simply can't play/show it live.

Don't worry though, that's not going to affect the obligatory end of year JPEG ship sale cash grab.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/home-featured-content/16249-The-Anniversary-Special

Seeing as they are most definitely engaging in a Ponzi-like scheme, if you put in for your refund now, they will have money next month to give you. New sales, fund old sales refunds.

Sarsapariller posted:

[quote="ManofManyAliases"]Stfu you insufferable man-baby. This time last year, you called that 3.0 wasn't even happening. No author on the face of this planet could even come close to changing the narrative more times than you have since THE JULY BLOGGGGGGgGGGGggggg.

Are you referring to this time last year when they said it was coming out in December and Derek (and the rest of us) said it wasn't?

And then it didn't?

Beet Wagon posted:

Chairman's Club Newsletter posted:

Finally, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 is getting closer to a PTU release. We would love for you to help with testing. If you're interested, keep an eye out for an email inviting you to join us. We are expecting to go to PTU before your next concierge newsletter on December 20th.

Combat Theory posted:

Hello thread its time to wake up. 3.0 went public PTU.

Beet Wagon posted:

So far all I'm seeing on reddit is "screenshot of ugly terrain OMG!" and guys... I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe... well maybe Star Citizen isn't that good?

Quavers posted:

From the announcement:

"The goal of this initial PTU release is to increase our total player count in an effort test concurrency. We also need you to focus on testing the traversal system by quantum traveling, landing on moons, locating and visiting Levski, and just exploring the great expanse of space around Crusader.

Please note that the complete Alpha 3.0 experience is not in this build, as some features are still being implemented and refined. These features will be added to future builds when ready for wider testing."

XK posted:

It's not working.

What isn't?

Everything.

Quavers posted:

DJKnight has just clipped through the planet surface

https://www.twitch.tv/deejayknight

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/203563336?t=04h04m00s

Drunk Theory posted:

You can bump someone interacting with the ship console and it knocks them out of the menu.

Got my new profession lined up in the Verse by the way.

Milky Moor posted:

There's no way this streamer either isn't aware how broken 3.0 is (given how much he's focusing on walking around and looking at things and not actually doing anything) or he's been coached and/or paid.

The vocal enthusiasm for 3.0 doesn't match the fact that there's no enthusiasm in the playing.

Holy gently caress, they need to drive 37kms to get somewhere at a ridiculous snail's pace. Vehicle physics don't seem to be any different to no-clip starships.
And then the Ursa rover somehow ended up in space.

Milky Moor posted:

It's so weird to me that he opened up the new missions screen, saw like half a dozen entries there, but didn't examine any of them and then went back to walking around in circles talking about how good it is.

That's certainly the behavior I expect of someone who has just gotten his hands on something new and exciting.

Drunk Theory posted:

Glad to see clipping out of the cockpit is still in 3.0. Gotta keep the classics.

SomethingJones posted:

Something Jones 3.0 Live Blog

https://www.twitch.tv/theastropub

The buildings to the left and right of the flight path as he lands at Levski are 2d sprites - you can see them sliding around, they aren't attached to the ground. Shadows are baked on. It's quite obvious. e: if someone can grab this that'd be amazing, it's a live stream and I don't know what I'm doing.

So the seamless planetary landing is:
1: You fly to a waypoint in orbit
2: You fly down to the waypoint on the ground

It's a pre-determined flight path.

The travel between planetary bodies is pre-determined as well.

Performance-wise it is running like utter piss, it's really bad.

Mocap NPC at Levski, his hands clip through his body as he emotes, that's allegedly the problem with all of the SQ42 mocap

Single digit frames inside Levski base everywhere

BPM monitor on HUD and Mobiglass don't match

"This game is early access, if you aren't interested in early access it ain't for you"

11-14 fps in Levski pretty much consistently

Background music stuttering badly, .5s gaps of silence in the bg music

"50 players per server now, this has also decreased the fps"

Miles Eckhart NPC not working, wasn't able to interact, "there's really no point in going to Levski right now, you can't do missions right now"


PLAYER TWO HAS ENTERED!
Another player has arrived at Levski, let's see how this works. They arrange to meet at the 14fps statue...

Music is stuttering and skipping with a vengeance now

PLAYER 1 is waiting at the bar, PLAYER 2 is coming down the stairs now...

"Can I live with 15fps? No of course I can't live with 15fps"

PLAYER 3 on chat "It's just crashed on me, I'm gonna leave it there"

PLAYER 2 "It's so laggy it's hard to tell what the gently caress I'm looking at"

PLAYER 2 arrives at bar, PLAYER 1 can't see him
PLAYER 2 on voice chat "Scam! Get a refund!"

PLAYER 2 is trying to interact with Miles Eckhart, PLAYER 1 can see Eckhart interacting but can't see PLAYER 2

Aaaaaand PLAYER 1 exits the game


- end of live blog thanks for listening get a refund -

SomethingJones posted:

Astropub has loaded up an empty Star Marine game now, he gave up with 3.0. Don't blame him, 11-14fps with one other player that he couldn't even see. What a pile of poo poo, no gameplay in sight - like NONE.

You know what, watching that actually put me in the mood for firing up Elite and just doing some random planetary missions and taking the old buggy for a spin in 60fps with superior graphics

Daztek posted:

https://clips.twitch.tv/JollyVibrantSparrowTBCheesePull

Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 in 60 seconds

roflingstones posted:

https://clips.twitch.tv/SuavePoorGrasshopperDogFace

looks like emergent horror elements are in!!

trucutru posted:

When the dude clips thru the moon one minute into this https://www.twitch.tv/videos/203592426?t=02h43m20s you can see which objects are "real" (that is, not part of the moon). So the buildings and the stalagmite-like rock formations are regular 3D objects while the slopes and hills are the ground generated by the planetary tech.

SomethingJones posted:

Ironically the only thing I've seen working in 3.0 are the doors.

Everything else is broken, everything.

Abuminable posted:

Sabreseven posted:

Why do the 'vessel' thrusters sound like Ben chewing the mic?

What does your heart tell you?

Abuminable posted:

Reprise from October 6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlILMmv17E4

Sabreseven posted:

More than 2000 years after the original event, we get to celebrate this very special time of year by watching the Jesus patch being born and then instantly crucified.

It's magical, and I for one am glad that unlike the Romans, we have easy access to plentiful supplies of popcorn.

Mr Fronts posted:

Please let my Christmas stocking be stuffed full of Major Tom 3.0 videos.

ahmini posted:

SCtrumpHaters posted:

Like some posts earlier "He can't even get in to a ship". Then one post later "he clipped through the ground on the moon". Like which is it. You owned yourselves in less than a post. Shits gonna be janky but you are acting like its so much worse than it is.

Troll or not this is a pretty good impression of backer thinking.

They're not gonna be seeing the godawful jank and everything being broken, they're going to be blown away by the fact that they can do something other than wander around a single space station. The mere fact they have an update with "3.0" printed on it (irrespective of it being nothing like the original scope of 3.0) is enough to claim victory over derek smart Derek Smart DEREK SMART

We'll see $200million out of this dumpster fire yet!

ahmini posted:

However, you can't deny that's exactly what the shills are thinking right now. They're so desperate for good news that literally any update (even a horribly broken one that is mostly unplayable) will be heralded as the next coming of Christ.

CRobbler unexpectedly squeezing this large turd out to PTU before it's even remotely ready is a loving genius move and SC backers are dumb enough to fall for it every single time.

Kainser posted:

Looks like Roberts won, time to wrap it up goonailures.

G0RF posted:

quote:

This will never not make me laugh.

It’s one of the early sketch comedies CIG created during the post Wingman early ATV era, usually as a lead-in for a short-lived series “Sandi Goes To Flight School”.

It was a botched attempt to make Sandi appear more likeable in “she’s a gamergirl!” kind of way. But Sandi’s visible unease with both acting and Star Citizen itself was simply unmistakable. It was bad enough even CIG realized they were pushing their luck, as only goons looked forward to the next installment. So they phased it out without comment and slowly started dialing her persona back to something more natural to her — disinterested news reader patronizing a viewership she’ll be happy to kick to the curb as soon as she gets her big Hollywood break and becomes relevant to a demographic with greater social currency.

Any day now.

G0RF posted:

Twerk just now: “i really want to show you guys missions — hopefully they fix the mission system. I was unable to complete every mission... except for the dookie one — where you pick up poo poo.”

G0RF posted:

Having watched several streams my $6 million prediction remains but now for the refunds sub.

Daztek posted:

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

So basically CIG decided that the best way to maintain enthusiasm funding was to show just how hosed they are publicly?

They saw how the thread was doing and decided to help us out

Goredema posted:

In 2022, Star Citizen will be in a "Failed Kickstarter" Humble Bundle, with the soundtrack as a free bonus, and customers will be asking to buy the soundtrack without the game included.

"But you don't have to activate the Star Citizen game code..."

"Nah, you take it back. I don't want it listed in my library of available games."

"But you can listen to the soundtrack without playing the game!"

"Nah, it's my money. Kill Jester."


Would you like to be? Apply now, and you could be CIG Lead Structural Designer within a few months!

trucutru posted:

It has a much better fly model. Just check this poo poo out!

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f536wfMLseo&t=870s

Quavers posted:

The leaked audio file, reuploaded: https://clyp.it/uzok35cm

XK posted:

Thanks for the audio. I needed to go to sleep early tonight. This is perfect.

reddit's definitive Star Citizen 3.0 bug survival guide posted:

4. General server desync.
Problem: The SC servers are being stress tested and are failing the test. Even during the midnight hours when no one in your region is playing, there will still be desync until the developers fix the problem. This particular issue is causing SEVERAL other issues you will encounter.

6. Doors won't open, the context menu won't come up
Problem: I've encountered this several times, especially when the desync is bad. Try looking at the open-pad on the door holding F from several different angles, and if that fails try another door. Also make sure that you have armor, and an undersuit equipped because you can't go outside in a T-shirt. If that fails, you are poo poo out of luck.

7. I went to go sit down on a bench, and now I can't get up because there is no option.
Problem: You sat on the bench, now you're hosed.
Solution: You can't even kill yourself on this one (ALT + Delete). You have to go back to menu, then sit through that agonizing load-in (if there's even room for you in the server).

9. I took too long to get in my ship that I spawned at Port Olisar and the station spawned another ship INSIDE of mine.
Solution: Run, run far away as quickly as you can. It looks funny, but walking up to observe this catastrophe will crash your game.

11. I started climbing a ladder and now I'm stuck.
Problem: You'll get onto the ladder then it'll be impossible to get off. Well, you can but the game will like yank you back onto it.
Solution: After getting to the top or bottom of a ladder, stop giving input. Your character might stand still and you'll be freed from the clutches of the ladder. If not, try giving no input for just a little bit, then spamming movement keys.

Pantsbird posted:

I've managed to fit 8 deskeletonized children into one SCU. They are arranged facing out from the center (they each understand they are alone). The largest ones are in the corners. Some of them will die, but it's normal so long as it doesn't happen too soon into the journey because they are Meat. Place into the refrigerated portion of the Cargo Grid that will kill the rest of them because they are Meat. Stack the partially skeletonized Slaves (bones relevant to Functions) in the corners of the hold and in the corridors so they don't occlude the Cargo Grid and prevent Commodities loading.

You are next. Duck your head so the box can close. You will be treated as Dead so the player can Respawn. Stat points are withdrawn. You don't whimper to avoid suffering the indignity of betraying distress to yourself. The box is ventilated your soul will linger for as long as possible before the Air Conditioning.

gently caress poo poo piss. Bitch bitch bitch bitch angler shunt bitch. Bitch, the children will die when they pick up the Rock. The children will die when they flee from the Rock. The albino children will be taken to be raised properly in a healthy, nurturing environment and groomed for the Professions. If the mother resists she will be put down. If the mother flees her legs will be removed.

For those Outside you have at hand at least one instrument or circumstance (a high place, a bottle of pills, a large quantity of liquor, etc) that will end you with little effort. You've known this would happen for some time. All of your responsibilities are relieved. The Org is grateful for your service.

Doody.

GORF posted:

Disclosures upfront:
1) I have never told another person to get a refund, though I’m friends with many who have, including Beet. I do however support backers’ rights to seek them for non-delivery of promised gameplay features.
2) I am a frequent poster on SomethingAwful, I (re)joined in early 2015, in large part due to my personal respect for Beer4theBeerGod, who at the time was responsible for some of the most incisive pieces of constructive criticism offered to CIG on their own forums. (He was also the SC thread moderator on SA at the time.)
3) I have had occasional interactions with present and past staff. This has only reinforced my previously held and exceedingly dim opinions of senior leadership.
—
I take as a given that Star Citizen will fall woefully short of the hopes raised for it by the claims of Chris Roberts and the cinematic fundraising teasers created under his direction by CIG. Whether the game fails catastrophically (such as by bankruptcy and shutdown) or fails by delivering a half-baked, underwhelming fraction of its promised Kickstarter features, failure seems a far safer bet than anything resembling success.
Chris Roberts is a man of overrated talents and underestimated mendacity. At this point even his most fierce defenders admit he has what might charitably be called an “overpromising / underdelivering” problem, yet neither skeptic nor believer would ever accuse him over having an over-apologizing problem, for he is a man incapable of the act.
Exaggerated claims, missed release dates, and outright falsehoods have been his stepping stones over the last five years to profound personal enrichment for himself and his formerly secret wife and yet his conscience is untroubled by his inability to deliver upon the promises that have proven so personally profitable to him.
Perhaps at this point it might seem I’m being overly harsh, so let me offer some helpful documentation to help better illustrate what I see as proof of his pathological practices:
1) Alpha 3.0 Infographic - Measuring the alpha against prior public claims by Chris Roberts
2) Star Marine - A Timeline of Noteworthy Events
3) Chris Roberts states that Squadron 42 will “probably” release this year (though CIG hadn’t yet started getting mocap footage in game, hadn’t finished major assets, still had no A.I. then and still has no A.I. now.)
I could go on at greater length than you might believe. His lies are a Tower of Babble twisting towards the heavens like the foolish ziggurat of legend — defiant, deluded and worthy of divine judgment.
For his character defects alone, he should not succeed, yet we live in a fallen world where wretched men of cunning actually are advantaged in their pursuits by virtue of not having to abide by ethics or altruism.
Yet Roberts is no such person, for what he lacks in character he lacks even moreso in competence. In his role as Chairman and Chief Executive of Cloud Imperium Games, his role demands of him to be a Macro-manager — yet he shrinks from such demands to instead thrive as one of the gaming industry’s all time masters in Micromanagement.
Consider what this article reveals about Roberts profound deficiencies as the chief project manager for the organization:
Kotaku UK: Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen
It is a lengthy read yet gives you absolutely everything you need to know about his priorities and his insufficiencies. Pay particular mind to the section that reveals for the first time what actually went wrong with Star Marine.
Mind you, consider this in the context of the “Just A Game Mode” Timeline above. In doing so you will see that Chris Roberts scolded backers for raising questions about a wildly late gaming module that he himself knew at the time was already trashed due to CIG’s terrible oversight of the outsourced development!”
There you have it — Chris’s deficiencies of competence and character on perfect collaborative display, and like the vain, entitled fool he is, rather than apologize (for the terrible guidance, for not better managing the funds backers had given him when outsourcing a key project, etc.), he shrugs the matter off and washes his hands of any real blame and expects backers to do the very same.
There are other ways to approach the question, “Why might the project fail?”
Another might focus on the backassward development priorities of Chris Roberts — who has overseen countless revamps and rebuilds of in-game assets while ignoring game loops and core mechanics....
Yet still others might point towards the rising overhead and falling revenues, the potential death spiral caused by projecting endless growth when you’re too arrogant to see you’re building a niche game, have saturated the niche market with no hopes of a crossover to the mass market due to purist design choices that exclude them...
But as for me, I feel the best argument against Star Citizen’s success — and by that I mean that the game delivers on prior promises made of it — is the fact that Roberts has spent the last 5 years perfecting the art of enrichment while falling so far short of his claims and yet he somehow sees a genius worthy of the faith and funds of others looking back at him in the mirror.
Whatever his past triumphs, he like his very game itself is built on the emptiest and most unstable of foundations. His word is worthless, his vision myopic, and his conscience deafened by voices of vanity forever shouting “you are the GREATEST DEVELOPER EVER” in his ear.
Whatever else he might be, such a person, no matter his age, has failed to truly become a man just as surely as Star Citizen will fail to truly become a game.

SomethingJones posted:

I'm taking a moment here to enjoy the comparison between G0rf's stylish, rhythmic, dramatic, sharp writing in a couple of transient reddit posts to Chris Roberts' trashy dialogue committed to tape by trained actors.