Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?
This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.
It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.
Chris Roberts is still rich, and could probably retire right now without worrying about anything. He could tank the company, and he wouldn’t care.
When has any really rich person ever gone “you know what? I actually have enough now…”?
MySpace guy comes to mind.
How could you forget about your first and only friend Tom?
Wozniak is probably the most famous example. He recognized the corrupting nature of money, decided he had enough, and stopped to live in comfort and occasionally work towards causes he finds important
Lots of people have done the same… But if they’re rich and still chasing after money? They’ll never stop
I guess Notch as well. Sold Minecraft for an obscene amount of money and got into indefensible right wing views instead.
I heard he got better after leaving twitter for years and coming back.
That’s the majority of them, but ragebait articles aren’t written about them, so you have no idea who they are.
Don’t be so easily manipulated by media.
I don’t, what else has he procrastinated on?
the wing commander series was famous for inflated development costs, freelancer was repeatedly delayed and eventually released like five years after it’s announcement, and since then… he’s been working on star citizen
Keep in mind Freelancer was released after Microsoft acquired Roberts’ company, kicked him out of a leadership role, and drastically slashed the scope.
Star Citizen is what happens when there is nobody above Roberts to say no, and now after years plenty of people under him with an interest in keeping the development churning.
Probably the same needs to happen here but I don’t see how it could happen in this occasion.
I mean, some people called this back in fucking 2012, but the dreamers bought into his vision. He’s always been real great about vision and lofty ambitions, but shit on execution. He sells dreams, but doesn’t know how to finish anything. Every project he was attached to that executed on deliverables, was due to control being outside of his purview and accountability enforced.
And then, compare it to No Man’s Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.
I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man’s Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.
Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.
Also to be fair (and critical), while Sean lied to both Sony and us about the state of the game-
They also probably did have most of everything they promised at one point, then the Christmas Flood happened. That’s when the lies started and but those lies were likely more for Sony rather than us, as it’s entirely possible Sony would have outright cancelled the game if they’d known how much was actually lost in the flood.
Instead they released what they could in the time they had left then just kept plugging away at it post release.
the christmas flood ?
IIRC their office flooded, destroying equipment and much of the game’s development with it.
alright
That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.
The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.
Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!
Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won’t be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.
Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.
Edit: clarity and conciseness: added “originally” to the end of the last sentence.
Yes, if you spend over $1k on the game you gain access to beta-testing etc.
And the most scary part? Plenty of people do spend this much money - I know many Carrack owners, for example, and this ship costed, when I remember it, $1200. Yes, very real $1200 for an in-game ship, and there’s plenty of buyers.
Heck, I know a person in Ukraine - not a high-income country by any standards, GDP per capita sitting at ~$5000, vs ~$85000 in the US - who spent about $6000 on the game by hiding huge portion of his income from his family for years. And this is not an exceptional case.
Yeah, Star Citizen is the world’s most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It’ll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a “complete game” state.
I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.
Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.
I just hope when it finally releases it has just as many tits as Duke Nukem Forever
Who’d’a thunk?
Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never “release” a finished game, you’re not going to be blamed for “bugs” while still collecting money on in-game purchases.
There’s a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It’s been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.
If massive universe sums like that were technically feasible all of the other studios would have done it. They were overly ambitious and didn’t understand the limits
I mean Elite Dangerous is right there, finished, playable and fun.
And it first released a decade ago already (in a couple months)
And is a mathematical model 1:1 scale of our galaxy.
…that sounda awful, surely there is journey skipping?
Nope, it’s real time travel with no FTL. The reason it’s “finished” is that it takes hundreds of real life years to get anywhere, so they have plenty of time to populate the world’s before the first players arrive.
Genius
No Man’s Sky too
Yeaaah, but they pulled the exact same thing Star Citizen did initially. They overpromised and underdelivered heavily. It took them years to get where it is now.
In terms of immersion I think they’ve done a great job. Played during a free weekend. But they need to aim for a gameplay loop, polish, and release. Not this feature creep mentality
Like, obviously?
i like to speak in question marks? good? im not being sarcastic?
Your comprehension issues are a you problem
?
Why would there be? Seems to work really well this way. Just keep milking the idiots of their money.
The actual news is that the money is starting to run dry
And this CitCon didn’t do anything to stem that tide if true.
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I’ve genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There’s just no actual focus on getting the game done.
We have a saying here that translates to something like this: “perfect is the enemy of done”. Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.
Also called bikeshedding.
My boss LOVES to throw that out all the time as a defense for when I inform him that he and mgmt are rushing something out the door that isn’t ready.
It definitely has wisdom but it’s not something to wave around all the time either.
Not that that’s the problem here, SC ain’t ever coming out and it’s not because of perfection. It’s because it’s a scam lol
Read this fucking gofundme trash: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.
This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.
This is not even true, they rewrote the engine to support native 64-bit precision to let them fit large spaces, they didn’t just make everything small. They basically employ all the people that used to make Cryengine since Crytek went out of business, so the engine they are building is actually pretty good.
I am engine developer, but even to this day you can clearly see Cryengine 3.x issue in star citizen.
They simulate zero-g areas as a Cryengine underwater map. You routinely see stuff floating as if in water even on planets with gravity.
You can also witness strange bugs that confirm the size issue (that they made everything extremely small in a Frankenstein version of a Cryengine map); one example would be your footmarks suddenly becoming massive.
The completely fucked up physics in sc (e.g. tanks bouncing like beachballs) is also a legacy of Cryengine 3.0.
Classic, the person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is SO sure that they know the truth. So much so they’re out here correcting people and handing out false info.
so the engine they are building is actually pretty good
Keep living in a false reality pal. I’m sure you k or so much more than the engine dev who replied to you.
How much $$ have you wasted on star citizen lmao
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
In fairness, when Star Citizen first went in to development CE3 was a modern engine.
This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.
If you’re talking about Chris, he’s a coder too, and wrote some of the entiry container system for the game.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your info about them scaling everything down and that being the cause for wonky physics, though.
Jesus fucking christ, that was their fundamental approach?!
… Did they ever come anywhere close to a dynamic server model, with dynamically sized in game zones being handled by dynamically changing server clusters, dependant on player count in an area?
I remember making some comments in a thread in the main SC forums about it almost a decade ago that were basically to the effect of: that’s almost certainly impossible to pull off with enough fidelity / low lag to actually work in a real time, absurdly open world shooter game, but if they could pull it off it would basically be the greatest achievement in game networking history.
After 10 years they increased the per server population from 50 to 100, but don’t worry server messing soon TM.
So no.
Meshing tests have gone up to 2000 and the shards that were left on overnight were 300-500. The current evocati build of 4.0 has meshing enabled, just limited to 100 for now
Wow… I’m pretty crap at making decisions, but like… not that crap 😅
That’s like an impressively bad choice
Damn. I had really hoped my grandchildren would get to play Star Citizen in their lives.
Misguided development at CIG? Why I never!
Shocked I tell you!!! Who could have seen this coming!?!
yeah they been grifting so long thats all they care about anymore
Today was day one of Citizencon and CIG revealed a lot of stuff that shows they’re still working to give players the game they want. Most of it was actually tech to answer the scalability problem for everyone wondering how they’re going to get to 100 star systems when they still only have 1
Next it’ll be 1000 star systems while we’re still waiting on Squadron 42.
Fun fact: If you take the year, add two, you’ll get the current planned release date for sq42
This isn’t dependent on the current year
Personally, I don’t think they should be aiming for 100 anymore, even if it was promised. That number was for the original pitch and was arbitrarily high since it was for a much shallower and easier to create game
I’d gladly take a single functioning system rather than wait another 12 years of my life for this Kickstarter project to deliver.
Today they announced that it was cut down to 5 and they will slowly work their way back up to 100 after launch (whenever that is)
It was a good decision. It was also smart of them to review the initial 100 planet goal to add some much needed context
The original pitch also had dedicated servers and those are gone, sadly.
How are they gone? The current servers are hosted by CIG, there’s no p2p or player hosted servers. How would that even work for an MMO?
dedicated servers == player-hosted servers, usually
I would say private server is more what you’re referring to, also CIG’s wording, but maybe agree to disagree. A quick search says that they haven’t cancelled that feature, but it’ll appropriately be the very last thing they work on
the common understanding of “dedicated server” is a server binary you can download and run yourself. a “private server” is usually still hosted on the company’s hardware.
Yeah no shit
