Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:
First of all, happy christmas and all that.
I took a break from SC for about 7 months, trying to understand game development and getting a child. Time flies, and as I backed this project ~5 years ago this wasn't even on the horizon.

However, I've played catch-up over Christmas and the best thing I saw was literally bagman and the fact that 2019 was their best fiscal year yet.
Also, I took a look at my favorite echo chamber, the SC-thread in the Gamestar forum and there still are the same 7-8 regular people there, theorycrafting and changing the narrative. Not too long ago, after CitCon: "CitCon is just for SC, SQ42 will be on the holiday stream you dumb gently caress, how dare you don't know this?" . Fast forward to today: Silence, but he is proud that he bought that mining tool to "earn money". So business as usual, with a few screenshots here and there and a "surprise" for the 25th. They assume it might be "THAT" vending machine (what a joke, please stop), which tells a lot about the world these guys live in.

Then I've noticed some bigger outlets like PC Gamer, BBC (and Gamestar, of course) covered SC in a rather unreflected (and positive) way, which puzzles me. CR is wasting tremendous amounts of "gamer money" since 8 years with basically nothing of substance to show for it and uses unheard of macro-transactions to support their "development as a service"-model which financed him a new 5 million dollar home (again, with no real product). This is way worse than any early access scam or scummy EA-microtransaction-move could ever be, while actively luring people into this with predatory marketing and straight lies. If the industry adopts that model everyone would be off worse, so I really can't understand why CIG isn't getting the "Daikatana/Duke Nukem Forever/Fallout76"-treatment by the gaming media? As a side note, in the worst case people blew maybe ~200 bucks for some collectors edition, but that would be it. In SC-land this doesn't buy much, though.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Beexoffel posted:

Thanks, I like these wide-perspective posts!

Absolutely, great post. Kudos to G0RF.

In a way it's sad that critical in-depth reporting needs to come from non-gaming journalists and is therefore being dismissed as lies or flat out ignored by most citizens.

On the other hand, we had positive press about Theranos and Fyre Festival before it all came crashing down, so maybe it is just as already speculated: Bad "journalism" paired with nothing to gain from making GBS threads on CIG. It's probably as simple as that the (print)-gaming media is completely bankrupt, not only financially but also morally. They don't sell many magazines anymore and their online premium offerings are pretty lame if you can simply watch your favorite YouTube gaming channel for free, the information is mostly the same anyway. They take what they can get and CR is probably aware of the fact that his customer base is largely the same as the people who still buy gaming magazines.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

kilus aof posted:

All of this video was created on the fly by a 64kB file:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ6ZzJeWgpY

Turns out when you are making a video you can do whatever you want.

Yeah, but to be fair, Mercury as a demo group consists of highly clever, technically versed people who probably forgot more about graphics programming than the typical 25yr old senior at CIG will ever know. Also, it is highly unlikely that these people would work for a con-artist like CR.


Ahahaha, what the...? How did I miss this? This marvel-ripoff intro alone is gold! And yeah, the typical demo scene video has more of a stroyline than this. But nice models, though. This rotating ship at minute 2 is also something I would expect from either a cheesy 90s trailer or some 15yr old making his first steps in video editing.

I can only assume that Calders stopped by at Chris' mansion, asking about SQ42 and the absolute silence.

"Mr. Roberts, we are worried that people will stop giving our endeavor free money, there was no information about this Squadron 54 game this year, what is going on?"
CR: "Caldi-Boy, calm down, I've got this. Want a cigar? Or a good nosy-nosy? Anyway, I've tasked some intern to make some video, that'll set things straight"
"Mr. Roberts, are you claiming that this short video with no real content will smooth out the waves and get people to give us more money without questions?"
CR: "Oh what do you know, I've made Wing Commander! I`am C-H-R-I-S R-O-B-E-R-T-S! This video is still more than these fools deserve, got it? Now please excuse me, I've got more important business to attend to, Grafton will show you the door"

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

MedicineHut posted:

Not because we are constantly fudstering over here but this visual teaser is legit seriously yawn inducing and far from the impressive but fake visuals shown in previous years cons etc. It does not just disappoint for the obvious lack of actual gameplay but for the visuals themselves. Honestly, it is almost like CIG is not even trying anymore. Disappointed.

Agreed, but at this point anything is better than nothing at this point for the citizens.

quote:

I have to say that I really enjoyed the teaser. Especially the many details were interesting and the graphics are even better. Which is of course annoying for the "But this looks old-fashioned even for an Alpha"-trolls.

Just the scene in which a worker is transported exhausted (or bored) looked incredibly good. Even at this camera distance the character looked incredibly detailed.
I'm really looking forward to 2020.

As if there were two different trailers/teasers and I've watched the wrong one...

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Agony Aunt posted:

As I said elsewhere, i know some guys who given a few weeks, 90 days tops, could produce a FMV pretty much like that.

While the gameplay video shown 2 years ago had cut scenes, and contained a lot of boring walking down corriodors, you could be pretty sure it was actually recorded in the game (or in some form of the game, possibly in a custom SC level) and someone could actually play it.

This video was pure bullshot.

True, but I have the feeling that this video from 2yrs ago could have been a stock-standard CryEngine map with 100% scripted NPCs and such, just to show something and figure out the rest later.
I'am pretty sure that if CIG has something with substance we would know by now. The sad part is that such an amateurish teaser with no gameplay footage in it after a year of silence is enough for the backers to be happy again. I think this only works because for most citizens, game development (and by extent, development of complex software systems) is some kind of black magic and they literally don't understand that such a video could be put together in a few hours (the assets are there, after all) with absolutely no game logic attached to it, not even collision detection and such, let alone AI.

Actually, one could even argue that this teaser is meant as some sick demonstration of might, announced as a "christmas surprise": Show off some 3D models, use tropes like the spinning spaceship and the marvel intro, and without any gameplay whatsoever just to demonstrate how gullible and servile the backers have become. The normal reaction to such a video should have been "are you loving kidding me?", not "wow, so much detail! faith restored!"

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Sandweed posted:

Why do all the people move like they are in a PS2 game, Roberts have spent like 100 Mill on mocap but not on a generic walking animation?

There were rumors that the whole mocap stuff he did prematurely because he couldn't wait to direct A-list actors is not usable at this point. I have no idea about motion capturing and don't know what kind of pre/post-processing has to be done to get it into a game engine, but given that we are talking about CR I don't think this is entirely out of question.

On the other hand, walking in video games is surprisingly hard. I think death stranding does it really well, but even that glitches out sometimes in difficult terrain, and they had actually competent engineers, something CIG doesn't have. So i don't expect this will get much better than the bad animations we currently have in SC and probably S42 if it ever releases (lol)

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

precision posted:

Also, it likely really is true that they can't use all that old mocap work, or that if they did use it it would look lovely or bad

And you don't get Gary Oldman out of bed for reshoots for cheap

They probably just use the barista, the janitor and Lesnick to stealth-redo the mocap-stuff.

:trustme: "Yes, eh, uh, this is, eh, totally Gary Oldman" *handwave*

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Mailer posted:

This would make sense if you were both seeing the same thing. Your eyes tell you that the game looks mundane in screenshots and hilariously bad in motion, but citizens don't see with their eyes. They see with their dreams. Everyone talks about the game in a state that exists entirely within their minds. The dumpster fire that is the current "alpha" game might as well not exist because all that matters is what it could become.

True, and this is a fact I find quite interesting.
I mean, who didn't fantasize with his friends after school about "cool" game ideas, like "Counter Strike with completely destructible environment and vehicles!" because we played that Half-Life Mod and read an article about the first Red Faction. Or even tried to make games, back then in form of a Quake 3 "mod" where we increased the firing rate of the MG by increasing some number and loaded other weapon models. But we were about 15yrs old at that time and, as we all grew older, got a "feeling" about what a game can do and what not. I remember reading some Ultima 9 preview in a magazine, "see this mountain on the horizon? You can walk up to it if you want", instead of unreachable skyboxes we all knew from Quake. Yeah, this was mind blowing, nowadays it is totally standard and in all honesty, such open worlds did not contribute much to gaming in my opinion because up to this day they mostly feel bland and empty. You can always feel the artificial nature of it and the limitations. Then we saw dynamic day/night cycles, gigantic procedural worlds, nearly photo realistic graphics, branching stories, ... but in the end it all still felt gamey. But you know what? This is okay because after all, these are video games.

However, this fact seems to be completely lost on the Citizens. They really believe (or 'dream') that CR removes all these gamey elements: Real snow on spaceships, no artificial and limiting maps, real, working escalators and unlimited detail down to whiskey physics and nothing less than a living universe. This in itself is completely insane, not just from an economical perspective, but because it puts emphasis on things that are completely irrelevant to a fun game. However, Citizens seem to be stuck in that world most of us left in their teenage days and think that some fidelity and gimmick-y features make a good and enjoyable game. Basically, that whole thing died with the scope increase and everyone still giving them money at this point deserves it.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Mr.PayDay posted:

???
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13971-Letter-From-The-Chairman-47-Million

"Speaking of stretch goals, last time around we put their future up to a vote. 54% of Citizens voted that we should continue to offer goals, and we’re going to honor that choice."

It is amazing how they change the narrative and truth. Chris Roberts is a liar, so the SC White Knights have no reason NOT to lie as well.
It is the essence of all Joe Blobers, Cymelion etc posting etc.
Ignoring reality, defending a dream and pretending that the POS PTU with 42 fps and janky broken animations is state of the art like we have 2014 again, and just pretend SQ42 is well on track.
Exactly, that SQ42, that we only got "videos" and "trailers" of. I would love to see a playable demo/slice/part, spoilerfree, just as a PROOF they have developed ANYTHING on a Mass Effect level from a decade ago.

This whole "but the citizens wanted the scope creep!" in itself is laughable.
You don't ask idiotslaymans how to build a car, don't you? "Do you want your car to be able to fly and swim? We will also put tank tracks on it to make it more offroad capable. All of this comes without drawback. Do you want this?" "Yes of course!".

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

monkeytek posted:

The types of errors they keep getting blow me away.

The absolute lack of testing is interesting, though. Things like the wrong format string in Star Marine or these scaling issues are nothing you need elaborate test-suites for to catch, just someone who plays it for a bit without being drunk is sufficient here.

It's quite obvious that CIG are in way in over their heads. With no one having a good overview over their FrankenEngine anymore and changes made by inexperienced (former) employees without proper documentation or tests in place there is absolutely zero chance this will go forward. Sure, with infinite money and enough trial&error they could achieve ... something, but all whales in the world don't have enough money to make that happen, the diminishing returns are getting worse and worse with each patch.

I`am pretty sure Amazon is psyched to buy this undocumented, buggy pile of technical debt with no meaningful architecture, tool support or at least a viable architecture to build upon.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

G0RF posted:

I think it’s a bit of a different problem.

The Frankfurt office still employs a lot of their CryEngine wizards. They continue to modify and augment their bastardized engine, hence the incremental visual improvements. 3.8 looks a lot better than 3.0. The addition of weather systems is lovely and novel. They’re building tools to procedurally generate space stations and performing other acts of engine wizardry that create the appearance of forward progress. It is forward progress of a superficial kind.

Chris and his Crytek team are shackled to each other. Chris needs them quite badly, so that he can dazzle his megawhales with stuff like the latest Squadron teaser. And the Crywizards need Chris every bit as badly, because their expertise has far less value outside of CIG. They were already in dire straits when Chris hired them. Now, there’s hardly anywhere else to go but Amazon Game Studios, where they would be even less safe, even less special.

So Chris and his Crywizards are handcuffed to each other, and to Star Citizen and their only way forward is down. Dig deeper they must because they can’t climb out and there isn’t anywhere else to go.

Even so, Chris + the Crywizards doth not a studio make. There is only so much they can do when they’re strong on stuff like rendering tech yet weak on so much else. Their weaknesses were only full display in every Squadron slice and teaser they’ve put out. Sure, the Holiday 2017 slice looked prettier than the Morrow Tour, but neither looked like a game. There’s no a single thrilling moment to be had in an hour and a half between them. The new teaser offers even LESS in this regard. It’s just the latest Frankenengine show reel.

When Red Dead 2 started putting out early teasers (all of which were beautiful), the real excitement came from imagining what all one could do in the game. The world looked amazing and brimming with experiences to be had. Same with the Cyberpunk slice, and with most “early look” stuff from innovative studios. Not so with Squadron. Long rear end stretches of boring monologues, and what little combat their 2017 slice served up looked both boring AND fake. Chris and the Crywizards have had twice as much time and probably five times the dev budget, and they can’t even hope to catch up to a mission like this from Infinite Warfare.

They’ve got a lovely dead verse to walk around in. They’ve got lots of celebrity characters spewing boring space pulp monologues. They can make an interactive movie with the tech they’ve cobbled together, and it might look pretty lovely in stretches. But they don’t have what it takes to make a game, only dull commercials and teasers for one. Which is why that’s all we’ve really seen of Squadron since 2015.

Chris can’t admit that he’s been bluffing this whole time. Can’t admit he’s made a hopeless botch of what should’ve been a cakewalk for him and his old Starlancer crew. He can’t admit that he can’t compete with even 2016 console titles, let alone whatever is coming in 2020. So he’s stuck, just as his Cryguys are stuck, adding refinements to superficialities. He will do what he’s always done, make arrangements to buy more time, so he can postpone whatever comes next when they prove they don’t know how to make the single player game they’ve been advertising for 7 years.

I'am not sure how many of the old CryEngine wizards are still with CIG, though. At least for me it seems like a bad gig for them to stay with CIG. These people are clearly qualified I`am sure they could find another job in the industry pretty easily that's not some crowdfunded dead end with a pretty bad reputation. But as long as it pays the bills, who knows.

Your point with the rendering know how is interesting, though.The renderer probably is one of the parts of the engine that can be enhanced relatively easy without touching other systems, which might be the reason we see some minor progress there.
However, I still think that the engine foundation (netcode, physics, UI, resource management, animation systems, ....) is a byzantine mess at this point where too many people with too little experience made too many changes in too little time. Another question is how well documented and architecturally sane CryEngine was in the first place. In terms of a solid foundation we haven't seen any major steps, bugs from the 3.0 release are still present (and got worse) and won't be fixable without major overhauls or a flat out engine change.

On a side note, imagining going to work there every day, being tasked to fix one random bug out of thousands without the slightest idea which change introduced it, no tests to do meaningful bisection or even the knowledge that there is one source for that bug and not 10 changes done by different people that manifests just now is a nightmare, even without CR in the equation. These guys are fighting an uphill battle with no chance of winning.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

ErrEff posted:

Just to underline this, a list of recent-ish CryEngine games:

Kingdom Come: Deliverance - The current highest-profile game using the engine (next to Star Citizen), released last year but received some DLC in 2019
Sniper: Ghost Warrior Contracts - Fourth entry in the franchise, one of the few success stories
Prey - Yes, for some reason Arkane did not use Unreal for this one, also a 2017 game
Hunt: Showdown - CryTek's own game, out of early access this year
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem - Early access since 2016
SNOW - Out of early access this year
Monster Hunter Online - Don't ask, technically not Capcom's decision since this game is run by Tencent (also a 2015 game)
Pandemic Express - Out of early access in 2019
Vanguard: Normandy 1944 - Started early access in 2019
Miscreated - Actually left early access in late December 2018 but I'll let it slide
Heathen: The Sons of the Law - Early access in 2018, supposedly abandoned
Racing Glider - Also a 2018 early access indie game, but doesn't look like it'll get finished
The Cursed Forest - Commercial release of an older mod, ported to CryEngine

There is very little demand for CryEngine expertise in the industry.

Interesting list.
It seems incredibly hard to develop a robust game using CryEngine outside of its FPS boundaries since the only games that were successful were exactly that: Story driven single player games or smaller PvP games with ~10 players. And Kingdom Come: Deliverance felt janky as hell and also Prey had its fair share of glitches, but both were good games I've enjoyed.

In a way it's funny to observe this whole mess from afar (at least I've got my pennies worth, one way or another). A bunch of people led by an incompetent moron, backed by even more moronic people that provide near endless financial resources, trying to build a plane out of stone whilst celebrating themselves because it has never been done before.

I really hope for the SQ42 beta in 2020, it will be pure, janky comedy.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:
Wow, the biggest german streamer Gronkh streamed Star Citizen 3.8 for about 10 hours

I can't be bothered wasting 10 hours of my time on that, but his viewership mainly consists of children, so there is that. Despite, I`am pretty sure this leads to a lot of new accounts from people that simply did not know SC up to this point and therefore more money for Chris to burn sigh. Is CIG running some new marketing offensive? PC Gamer, BBC, Gamestar, big mainstream Streamers like Gronkh all of the sudden "report" about SC 3.8, despite the fact that basically nothing has changed, except for new bugs?

ggangensis fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Dec 28, 2019

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

MedicineHut posted:

Dont they have to disclose if they are sponsored or funded for a specific video/stream?

Probably, I don't use twitch that often, so maybe there is something I've missed, but I couldn't find some sort of "sponsored stream" message.

Anyway, I don't think he will stream SC anytime soon again, even during holidays he just got 11.8k views on that stream. Usually he generates at least three times as many views per stream.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

colonelwest posted:

LOL Of course Chris will just turn the fidelity switch to maximum someday.

It’s been fun to see them try to come to terms with the fact that every PC game and most consoles games look better than SC now. Graphics were always the one thing they could fall back on. First it was the best looking game ever, then it was the best looking game at this scale, then it was the best looking MMO. I guess when you compare SC to a dead genre dominated by Chinese gotcha mobile garbage, it does look pretty good.

Like they got lapped by a few games like Metro Last Light and TW3 around 2014/2015, but now it’s just everywhere. I’m playing the Outer Worlds on ultra and it’s open areas look much better. MS Flight Simulator is about to drop with a gorgeous 1:1 recreation of Earth and it’s going to absolutely drive them nuts.

Yet the "cinematic" S42 teaser convinced citizens that this is the best looking game ever.
Let's face it, CR has tapped into an unlimited amount of funds. Be it gross incompetence, nepotism, mismanagement, it all doesn't matter since the money keeps coming in. I`am pretty sure in the end CIG will have something, but the result will be grossly disproportionate to the money put in.
On that note, I`am pretty sure the remaining backers literally have no idea about how software is made and really think that this waste of biblical proportions and inefficient work is normal (:trustme: "you see how the sausage is made"). But could I have fallen for the Theranos scam? Possibly, I have no loving clue about blood testing, not even a vague idea how this could work, so for me it might be believable. And this is one of the major problems I see with crowdfunding, you can basically lie to laymans and/or idiots with no control whatsoever, and this is exactly what Chris did with his "scope increase". That some backers think there exists a secret dev build or increasing the polygon count is simply a matter of a "fidelity slider" shows this, these guys left the world of facts long time ago.

Also, I think Citizens have more severe problems than a renderer that doesn't look so fancy compared to other games: The whole engine core is completely rotten and by now every change/enhancement/bugfix costs an insane amount of time and money, which despite unlimited funding, will grind the project down.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

vyst posted:

The only stretch goals met were Ben's pant sizes

:gary:

Mailer posted:

Coming relatively late to watching this project, like a motorist slowing down to watch a crash scene, I'm still a bit fuzzy on the history here. I thought (from reading posts) that CIG just threw up a "what would YOU like to see in SC?" post like any other dev would just to keep up the pretense of interacting with the community. Then reddit decided this actually constituted a legally binding vote and therefore it is the citizens to blame for the "required" scope increase. Did the crobbler ever actually point to that dumb poll as the reason for delaying the game indefinitely?

It's seriously hard to follow a narrative when it's constantly being rewritten.

As you put it like this, it is really hard to keep track of. I think we have the following parts:

1. The "official" stretch goals as listed on RSI Website and Kickstarter

I would call these "transparent goals", albeit Chris deceived people about the current state of the game and the engine capabilities. Some goals like the 6 million ones (The Bengal carrier will be unlocked for persistent universe play. or the famous Star Citizen will launch with 100 star systems.) aren't possible until today, this was just a matter of "promise some poo poo and figure out the rest later"

edit: I think I`am not entirely correct here. It seems like everything after the ~2 million mark is one of the stretch goals added after the vote?

2. The community vote if stretch goals should be added ("54% of Citizens voted that we should continue to offer goals, and we’re going to honor that choice")
In a perfect world, a sensible project lead would have stopped right there, knowing that even the existing goals are not reachable, but here we are. Anyway, the narrative is that the backers basically forced them to scope creep. These are the numbers I`am aware of:

quote:

Q: Should we continue to offer stretch goals? (Total Votes: 34590 - 7% of Citizens, ~14% of alpha backers)

55% - Yes

26% - No

20% - No preference

I would call it a blatant lie and an insult to ones intelligence, but that's probably not a problem for the remaining citizens.

3. Insane promises made by Chris in his YouTube shows
I can't recall too many of them, but there were some hilarious ones there, cited until today by Citizens ("Chris said that..."). I think these 10k people fleet battles and that whole Barkeeper-Physics stuff originated here, but I could be wrong.

---
Anyway, I think Chris was well aware that the engine he had due to the Crytek deal was unsuitable, but I guess that in the beginning he really believed he could augment it as much to support all of these lofty stretch goals. I also think that it became obvious pretty fast to him that they wouldn't be able to create the technical foundation for the things they promised (and they still haven't), which is the point where it transformed into a full scam. He continues taking money for a project he knows won't live up to even his 6 million dollar stretch goals, whilst paying him and his family 6 figure wages a year. And this is still going because Chris created the perfect storm:
- On the surface, he was the wing commander guy, his fans all in their late 30s or 40s by now and therefore financially strong.
- He created that whole "evil publishers" narrative, which, in 2012 with all the bad console ports and cancelled PC exclusives hit a nerve.
- The argument "no publisher, so every penny goes to development", sounded somewhat believable back then. In reality it enabled out of control spending and waste on a level that would never have happened with a publisher
- Superficial progress (new assets, poo poo like caves, ...) keeps remaining backers happy. The ones left are naive dreamers that don't see a problem with bugs existing since 3.0. They believe every bug can be fixed, it's just a funny oversight by CIG, not a symptom of a rotten foundation
- The remaining backers love theory crafting, which fits perfectly with CIGs business model of selling ships. It's hard to believe, but people can obviously talk for days about the cool things they will do with their 900$ 890jump.

ggangensis fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Dec 30, 2019

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

G0RF posted:

Yes, repeatedly, and he still would if pressed.

What should alarm the Citizenry, yet never does, is that Chris has also said they “fund development” in proportion to the funding raised. It’s the Pollyanna way of confessing there is no scope document, no specific budget locked to deliver (x) functionality by (y) date for (z) cost.

This brilliant strategy lead CIG to the brink of depletion in 2018. But for Calder’s $46 million, he’d have been on fumes before mid-year and forced to start a big operational scale back. But this recklessness bothers the Citizenry very little, and they’ll be little bothered if he dilutes further and does it again. Whatever allows the continual postponement of delivery of finished product is justified. The fact that by Chris’s own roadmaps, development has been openly floundering for two solid years (as opposed to invisibly floundering the 4 years prior) troubles them hardly at all.

Chris has a special gift for buying himself more time, but even with a quarter billion and 7 years, he’s given no indications that he can develop a game. The latest Squadron teaser is little more than a portfolio reel for their environment artists and asset designers. It offers hardly a second of anything resembling gameplay, which is a huge step back from the mostly gameplay free, faked-it-because-we-don’t-know-how-to-make-it vertical slice from 2017. (That slice, incidentally, was created to convince the Calders that Squadron 42 was a celebrity packed safe bet blockbuster that was more in need of marketing funds than further development monies, and it is thanks to that fiction that Roberts got the investment needed to allow him to crawl pitifully to where he is today...)

Nothing more to add, but I remember Chris showed slides along the lines In a publisher-driven development, only X out of Y dollars reach development, with our approach Y out of Y dollars reach development some years ago. What is the current citizen-narrative on that front? Do they still believe, after a quarter billion sunk and zero MMO-features on the horizon, that CIGs development model is particularly efficient and that a publisher-driven studio would need half a billion or more to achieve the same as CIG did?

So many hilarious things CR did, said and lied about got lost over the years of changing narrative and lead to this blurry version of the whole thing, it's a pity.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Hav posted:

Weirdly, they really seem to be okay with a contractual relationship that is constantly changing on the vendor side.

When reading that SC thread in the Gamestar forum I got the impression that this mainly because of two reasons:

a) Chris knows what's best for them
b) Chris does things they didn't know they wanted

Also, they use the amount of money sunk as a measure of success, so in their book CIG is doing everything right and owes nothing to the backers, so they can change things as they see fit and if you don't like it, leave.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

As if Chris cares anymore about original Kickstarter backers. The few left and still buying poo poo could find out tomorrow that CR is the reincarnation of Hitler, syphoning money via crowdfunding to build a fleet of flying saucers, planning to attack the free world from his base on the Southpole and they would still buy a Mining ship or whatever the newest hype is in SC land. The majority is probably disillusioned and therefore won't burn more money and is therefore completely irrelevant to CIG. Only new money.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Strangler 42 posted:

I love that Kickstarter the company does not give one poo poo about what happened to Star Citizen. They got their cut and now it's all on Chris to deliver.

Estimated delivery Nov 2014

In general, that Kickstarter page is gold. Haven't looked at it for ages.

So, where is:
- VR support?
- HOTAS, flight chair (lol), rudder pedals support?
- The vast 1km long carrier?
- 10X the detail of current AAA games?
- 100s of sub-components, many of them moving and articulating just like they would in the “real” world?
- Star Citizen will take advantage of your extra processor cores? Non-existent optimization doesn't count, btw.

Reading this stuff, I feel a bit of shame that I've backed this. Sure, I grew older, but sentences like "And that hero is you, the unappreciated PC gamer. The ignored Space Sim fan." or "Instead of taking this prototype to a publisher for a green light, we are cutting out the middleman and taking it to you." should have raised a red flag for me. In retrospective, this whole thing is an absolute trainwreck built on lies from start to finish.

edit:

ggangensis fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Dec 30, 2019

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

stingtwo posted:

now that other companies are using it, it will soon

I doubt that CIG has the know-how to properly integrate Raytracing into CryEngine 3. But okay, let's assume they give this task to a junior dev that reads up on this stuff and has some more-or-less workable solution ready to go in a year or so:

In true CIG fashion there will probably be one raytracing-enhanced puddle somewhere, where, when you look at it, get single-digit fps with an 2080ti. Citizens will of course be ecstatic, "Wow, look at this puddle! This has never been done before! Here, take my money!" since that`s the cycle of things.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

TheAgent posted:

can you imagine being that into loving WING COMMANDER of all poo poo that you are trying to preserve its history, including the loving lovely rear end gently caress of a movie

I mean goddamn read this. read it and weep for there is no God

Poor Ben, of all things he could have used to flee reality he chose a loving gaming franchise that's dead since the nineties. Why not Star Trek or Star Wars? He could happily discuss how lovely discovery is with his fellow nerds, but no, he chose to become a "Wing Commander Historian"
As we speak of Ben, what is the current narrarive on the citizen front there? Is he still doing remote work for Cig?

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

stingtwo posted:

When I said CIG will implement it soon, thats :thejoke:

Company X announces feature Y, CIG makes an announcement that they too will also have feature Y, with no thought process on weather it's feasible or doable. Talk about it for 10 months of the year in videos and twitter, then either release sub-par poo poo or it never went beyond the video discussions, either reason is due to incompetence of what are basically 1st timers who have less development experience than people who sell asset flips on steam or just Chris having read a new thing and thinking it should be worked on instead.

Look at their pro-generation planets BS they have been spouting for 3 years now, it's not even close to what is considered progen.

But... but... Chris said once they have their development pipelines in place everything will go at lightning speed! But, yeah, sometimes I think that even the devs of Hentai Sniper or Harem Trigger are more capable than CIG, the comparison to steam asset flips is actually quite on point, only difference is that CIG has really, really expensive assets, the rest is about on par.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

AbstractNapper posted:

Happy Squadron 54 year everyone.

And a happy new space court.

Happy new year, is anyone celebrating New Year's Eve on Port Olisar with me?

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

This is indeed a nice view into the bland and depressive reality of SC in the year of the lord 2020.

quote:

Everything StarMap
Often buggy, can't select certain markers sometimes, can't plot routes, it's outdated and clunky.

One could argue that after 8 years things like the star map should work more or less flawlessly, but no, not even route plotting works. One commando suggests a "quick fix", though:

quote:

A fast patch until a UI overhaul can happen would be a text based nav system, type your destination and confirm.

Which actually doesn't sound too bad, and as long as it is PC only, why not? I mean, yeah, it's CIG we are talking about, but such a thing should not take more than one or two months, depending on whether or not their UI supports text input via keyboard and has an easy to use list widget, so give or take a few weeks.

But Citizens are 100% in on the CIG narrative that every change, no matter how mundane it might be, is a task of biblical proportions:

quote:

I'm not a game developer, but from everything I know there's no such thing as a "fast patch". Even the most mundane things can require Herculean feats to implement. If it was that easy i'm sure they would have done so by now.

And this is exactly the point, these kind of changes should be doable in a small amount of time. This is basically UI-only without intersections with game logic, physics or anything else. But yet, CIG can't, probably because a) no one has thought about it yet or b) there is simply no person (left) with enough knowledge about that starmap-UI-code to make this change in an acceptable timeframe. Another theory is that their architecture is indeed so hosed up that this UI stuff is intertwined with gamelogic and messes in places it shouldn't, so every change is like navigating a minefield.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a pretty small enhancement. In normal games such an addition would be a bullet point in the patch notes and that's it. For CIG it is a big problem, let alone doing actual changes that mess with the physics, netcode and much more. These guys literally came with a knife to a gunfight. Sure, due to unlimited funding they can trial & error their way through whilst burning insane amounts of money, but well...

ggangensis fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Dec 31, 2019

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

AlbieQuirky posted:

Yes! At Citcon, they gave out a glossy magazine that was full of lore he had written. What I saw looked very competent, if uninteresting.

Can't tell if serious or not :raise:

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Fidelitious posted:

I'm confused and horrified by the people talking about 7 HOUR and 10 HOUR long bug-riddled sessions full of crashes! What's wrong with these people?

I was somewhat recently playing one of the quite old Call of Duty games and my Russian buddy apparently got stuck on a gate somewhere so the game couldn't make him show up and open a critical door to progress.
After checking online that this was a known bug and that the only workaround is restarting the level I promptly quit the game, uninstalled it, and just read what happens in the remainder of the campaign (there were only 1.5 levels left at that point).

I don't have time to waste on game-breaking bugs, but apparently there are people out there with a spare 10 hours to spend on this?

I'm pretty sure a lot of these guys have battered wife syndrome. They think they play the game wrong, their PC has issues or it is just bad luck the server crashed or a bug appears. They see all the screenshots from people having obviously fun, reading about "flight nights" and witness how much fun Rex has in his streams, so it must be their fault, right?
I think people actually playing the game on a regular basis are off the worst. They did not only waste money but also a lot of time, lying to themselves. I think the backers just buying spaceships and theorycrafting are ultimately way happier.

ggangensis fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Jan 1, 2020

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Afaik CIG is on CryEngine 3 (initial release oct. 2009), which might explain this:

quote:

From 2015 CRYENGINE has used a form of ray tracing for our in-house GI solution, Total Illumination, used in shipped titles like Kingdom Come: Deliverance and our very own Hunt: Showdown. Until now, one of the limitations of CRYENGINE’s GI solution was the level of detail in real-time reflections.

There was some picture showing when Lumberyard was branched off and where Star Citizen stands, but I`am pretty sure they are stuck on a version without Raytracing features. Can't find the picture, though.
In a way CIG can be happy that the general pace of graphics development seems to have slowed down quite a bit compared to the 90s, this buys Chris some time.
I remember the passage from Masters of Doom where Romero saw the colored lighting in Quake 2 which convinced him an engine change was necessary. Those fundamental industry changing improvements won't happen to Chris, so he is just concerned with crossing off bullet points. Some half-assed raytracing implementation is enough for them. The Vulkan renderer they talked about? Just put in some implementation that`s worse than the D3D one, just so he can say they have it. Business as usual in SC-land.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Scruffpuff posted:

The evidence I'd use is what you just said about the report to fix ratio, but the deeper evidence is that the game isn't working in almost any capacity. CIG just can't get it to work. The remaining backers are stupid enough to see a malfunction as a "bug" because they are doing the reports in good faith, but we know better. Clipping through ships, and the tens of thousands of other problems aren't bugs - they're the inevitable symptoms of a company that couldn't code a calculator app trying to make a complicated game.

The game isn't even broken - it's an attempt to code a playable demo, and the attempt failed so hard it burned a quarter billion dollars over a decade and has nothing to show for it. It sounds like a philosophical point, and maybe it is, but that's what we have. A model-viewer where the camera is temporarily placed inside a badly animated ship or commando. For all their claims of not "cheating" and doing things "real," CIG made the fakest game of all. A first-person camera tour that looks like a game in screenshots. Every time they add more graphical assets, it's touted as progress. Every time they claim to have put in a mechanic, like "mining," which is just a button press for the camera view, it's touted as progress.

CIG's progress isn't additive, it's multiplicative. And they started at 0. Which means that's where they still are.

Well, I think the remaining Citizens are loving stupid. There, I said it.
They think some superficial poo poo like caves, new spaceships or a new planet equals progress. What they don't see or want to see is that people still falling through geometry, no MMO-features whatsoever, the buggy UI system, hosed up physics and such. CIG wasn't able to tackle any of these problems in a meaningful way. And no, this is not some fan project or an open source game, its a ~250 million dollar, supposedly AAA game which CIG is using to play development studio since more than 8 years.

The Citizens don't understand this. They think people fall through the geometry because some dev wrote stuff like * 0.01 instead of * 0.1, fixable issue, just an oversight. Well, no, their whole foundation is so rotten that bugfixes that touch engine stuff are not possible in a sustainable way anymore. 8 years with basically no progress and the same bugs still present are proof enough for me at this point. However, the Citizens are proud that they help the "bugsmashers" (what a loving stupid description) and feel like real gamedevs. In reality this bugtracker is just window dressing, CIG is simply completely in over their heads, the "fast victories" of the early days cost them dearly now. No one there ever said things like: "No, adding this feature in that way will break a thousand things along the road and is unmaintainable", and if someone did, he was booted by CR afterwards. He is a visionary and doesn't want some hesitant naysayer around him.
In a way it's sad, if Citizens want to play gamedev, there are some open source games or engines out there that could really use a hand. And you know what? Citizens would do something good for a change instead of financing some hack his new mansion and I guarantee that they would learn a thing or two about programming.

Anyway, since the remaining backers are really incredible stupid this whole thing will go on for a few more years. A new planet, a new star system, some new ship and these morons are happy.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Huh? Did I miss something? The narrative changed again and SC is considered beta now? So SC is feature complete and there are just some known and unknown bugs and performance issues left? Good to know, I'll buy an Idris now.
This is the one thing that really pisses me off about Citizens. They are completely clueless and think they know how things work just by drinking Chris' Kool-Aid. They assume that every developer is so atrociously bad as CIG. Do these guys really think titles like GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Horizon Zero Dawn looked that bad after eight years?

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Rugganovich posted:

You're right.

I was outlining the irony of CIG cutting ties with Crytek, when Crytek seem to be enabling more and more functionality with Cryengine, to try and stay relevant, whereby CIG are stuck with an outdated branch.

Yeah, as you've put it, it seems like an interesting constant in CRs life. First he pisses off MS (effectively booting him from Freelancer development), after that, Kevin Costner (basically booting him from Hollywood) and now he pissed of CryTek, possible the only people on the planet that could at least somewhat salvage their "StarEngine" by throwing away everything CIG did and redo it within sane architectural limits.
But yeah, probably even that would only delay the inevitable, that whole idea of the highly fidelitious PU is destined to fail since it's inception. It`s just a vehicle to sell jpegs.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Kikas posted:

Well then they will loving never get sued lol

:gary:

Add this to the pile of reasons why SQ53 won't see the light of day. I mean, what do citizens want to do about it? "Listen Chris, we don't buy new ships if you don't get your act together"? Yeah, sure. In reality, they will buy more, that's how insane this whole thing became.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Inacio posted:

Saw this on the games subreddit, when I saw there was a thread about the lawsuit I went to the comments expecting the Citizen Defense Brigade and sure enough there they were.

This is also one of the reasons this whole projects deserves to die rather sooner than later. I mean, sure, other games also have annoying fanboys, but Citizens see the development of their "dream" in danger if too much bad press leads to the dry up of money. So they feel it's their holy duty to defend SC, lie about it and lure other people in to do "their" part. It's disgusting and needs to stop.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Beexoffel posted:

Thanks for the explanation there; I'm not up to date on gaming journalism except what I pick up from this thread. I don't see how a gaming magazine can help me further than for writing a review of a game. Which I already see when I look at a game's store page in Steam.

Yeah, and speculations aside, I`am still baffled that the gaming press shills SC so hard. Be it Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana, SW: Battlefront II or No Mans Sky, they all got their fair share of flak including "don`t purchase"-warnings.
Yet, SC is way, way worse than these titles. Call it a pledge or whatever, after 8+ years this deserves a critical look by the gaming press (that likes to frame itself as pro-consumer), warning people that they are most likely just burning their money. I mean, they were able to do it for some 5 dollar cosmetic DLC, but can't for 500+ Dollar spaceships in some shady, crowdfunded project that is in development hell since 8 years but still has it`s PR-machine going like its Coca-Cola?

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Rotten Red Rod posted:

I'd guess that's true in practice but not in intention. There's likely a sad, neglected corner of CIG full of recent graduates desperately trying to cobble the assets together into a game with little-to-no direction from Chris, who lost interest once they stopped letting him direct celebrity mocap, and gets completely scrapped and restarted every few years when someone actually bothers to take a look and realize everything's unsalvageable.

That`s also my theory.
Highly motivated graduates, thinking "how hard can it be?", giving wrong estimates due to lack of experience on what they can accomplish. And how should they know?The higher ups have no idea what they want either and CR obviously doesn't give a gently caress anymore, probably investing more time planning his exit strategy than anything else.
I can only imagine how it might be for a young graduate, getting thrown under the bus at CIG without proper direction or mentors guiding them. Depending on the personality, either with negative impact on their psyche, or they just don't give a gently caress, collect their paycheck and playing DnD in the office. Before that happens though, the poor lads will work long hours trying to hack something together and the result can be seen everyday, it's called the PTU.
By the sheer amount of expensive trial&error brute-force-work they have something more or less playable, but this development model isn't sustainable at all and any other studio without a pyramid scheme inspired funding model would have been dry by now for years.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Dogeh posted:

You forgot to mention the 10k players.
And the attention to fidelity.

Since we are at it, is there somewhat reliable data available about player counts of SC and Star Marine? I have the gut feeling that the narrative CIG tries to build that SC is some big-rear end game with a large community doesn't hold water. I mean, yeah, there is a community theorycrafting on Spectrum or Reddit, but how many of these people actually play Star Citizen or Star Marine? I doubt the player counts are nearly as high as CIG wants the people to believe.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

G0RF posted:

:gary: —“It’s real!”

*snip*

Holy crap, where are these quotes from? In 2020 they are even more hilarious

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

AntherUslessPoster posted:

Imagine finding this thread later in 2036 and finding out that the hype is still the same, but 20 years later?

As there are Wing Commander historians, there will be Star Citizen historians. And they will have a hard time creating a truthful and consistent picture, with the ever-changing narrative, smoke&mirrors by backers or CIG and such. And hell, we will need them. Drawing a correct picture of the Mid-Tudor Crises is a calk walk compared to working through all the lies and changed history since Star Citizens and SQ54 inception.

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

G0RF posted:

That face when Derek Smart was right...

:gary:

What should shock folks is just how many CIG employees repeated the lie for Chris over the course of several years. Brian Chambers deserves special commendation for his Best Dramatic Monologue performance on Batgirl all those years back.

It baffled me when Chris said the switch to Lumberyard has taken them one or two days. This is absolutely impossible, even when they magically sat on the exact same CryEngine revision. Everyone that was involved in a larger software project at one point has to know that even in a best-case scenario there will be merge conflicts, unforeseen difficulties and such. Changing the complete foundation of such an enormous code base, even if identical or at least similar, costs a lot of time and effort.
However, my conclusion was wrong. I thought they switched, but it took them months and Chris just lied about the time to not piss of the backers with his wasteful management style. However, the backers believed him, praised him for the fast change and Derek was the only person actually calling him out for this bullshit claim.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Bootcha posted:

I predict that nothing will change as far as public optics.

Roberts will remain hidden from camera save the pillar talks about Star Citizen, CitCon, and possible whale dinners.
Little if nothing will be said about SQ42, except in passing of "and X needed for SQ42 as well".
Erin, TonyZ, and Chambers are still the apostles that the faithful cling to.
JPEGs will be sold.

The same pattern from 2019 will hold.

Why should it change? It brought in 40 million last year.

It's not like anyone can punish Roberts for his hubris.

Except himself.

I'll go on and predict that, in addition to that, the funding will continue in 2020 and might even top 2019. We'll see them saying that SQ42 will be integrated into SC because of evil crytek. Citizens will be happy about it because it is better that way and will continue buying ships. The PTU stays the same buggy mess it was in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, but a new planet and a jumpgate will be heralded as big progress.
Business as usual, Chris can't fail with these backers.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply