Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

So after 10 years of development, NOW they have the tools in place to really fix the UI. That’s good to know!

I like that there’s a reply to that comment that compares asking about financials to asking for Obama’s birth certificate.

Yeah, I saw that. I guess that tool isn’t aware that CIG started showing a financial “brochure” since Dec 2018 and which showed that the project had been operating in the Red every year. I can’t wait to see the 2019 numbers.

lmao!

“I expect bugs and normally, I am not bothered by them, but to have a free fly event with the game so unstable is frankly doing more harm than good at the moment.”

Maybe if “they” hadn’t been “not so bothered” for 8 years and perhaps demanded more/given less, from/to the dread pirate Chris Roberts, maybe then RSI would (eventually) realize that the funding would increase with the quality of the game, and not the quantity of ship jpegs.

But, in that universe, Hong Kong would also be free and we’d not been in lockdown due to people eating bats, so… madness I know.

At this point I am just hoping for the external interest in SC and this sub to die down soon so that we can get back to our normal subreddit lives.

That’s pretty sad.

Yup. Funny how back in 2015-16 when I was calling for accountability the faithful just kept attacking me, even as the development continued to decline - while croberts and his clan were getting rich off free money (zero accountability).

Now they’re regretting that.

Heck, it’s funny to me how I paid attorney fees out of my own pocket to ask for things like refunds, financials and a dev schedule. They and CIG just ignored me, told me to piss off etc. Then, just like magic after refunds became a thing, they updated the ToS to give refunds only within 30 days, the first dev roadmap appeared in 2016, and the first financials (which showed that the project was in the Red since day one, despite record breaking backer funding) appeared in Dec 2018. Then came the $46m bailout which, to any sane person, should have raised some serious alarm bells.

I will say it again. The project isn’t going to be a slow burn, it’s going to crater suddenly and in spectacular fashion. Just wait for what comes next.

I have no idea on how or when (other than in total failure) it will end, but I would argue that the last couple years have already been a slow burn to the end. The amount of times they have announced that they are working on some core system rework and then nothing improves and they announce some brand new buzzword jumble core rework instead makes it clear that they simply can’t make any progress. The last few years are a slow (time) burn to the end and an outrageously fast (money) burn.

@dsmart, as a game dev, would you be able to help me understand:

  1. Why is CryEngine so inefficient for a large-scale game?
  2. Why can they not even match the performance of Crysis Wars, which was able to do 16v16 multiplayer? How did they screw it up so badly?

From the looks of things with CW, it looks like that game has a hell of a lot fewer “moving parts” than in a single cofee maker in Star Citizen, which probably explains why one runs like the shit and the other looked like it was pretty smooth (albeit looking like a BF2 mod - from the video I saw, which might’ve been done that way for FPS reasons).

Basically: CW is “simulating” gravity on 16 players and whatever objects they are currently in, whereas Star Citizen is simulating everything in the “universe” in time, space, gravity, lunar orbit, the sun reflecting on solar panels, heat, moisture, chris roberts’ gravity, etc on every single 3d object in the game.

Good points made. However, to their credit, they have implemented some core systems (e.g. planets, fabricated city/landing zones etc) which, regardless of their incomplete and shoddy nature, went towards the full picture. Unfortunately for them, the lofty goals and promises set by croberts are beyond the scope of both the engine and talent. So we end up with this complete mess that - while still in pre-alpha for all of 9 yrs - ends up breaking even more with each new build.

Just imagine this: they haven’t even completed a single star system and the engine is a complete failure. So how exactly are they going to build the other 105 promised? Heck, the game can’t even load zone instances without falling over - and they still don’t have the ability to go from one system to another - a critical requirement for building out the game’s universe.

Maybe they can cheat. Just fire up a new process/thread loading the game/assets from the next zone, and once it is fully loaded just throw up a loading screen in the first executable, ‘alt tab’ to the next window where all is loaded and close the first :-D

That can explain the 32GB memory requirement/recommendation :D

It wasn’t built for that. It was built, just like Unity, UE etc in their early days, for small levels. In other to give the impression of a large world, you had to stitch together several and hide them behind a loading screen. For instanced and session based games - mostly fps - that was never a problem. But then large open world games became a thing, and all of a sudden these engines had to later adapt. And those, like CryEngine, which were based on legacy design, ended up using various kludges to make this possible. Except that even Unity and UE did so via plugins, then later put in support for massive sizes levels.

The reason they can’t match any game’s performance is because:

  1. CryEngine is super ineffecient
  2. In order to sell JPEGs, they created very high fidelity (polys + textures) objects
  3. The network stack is based on CryEngine - which wasn’t designed for MMO games. It has the same problems that every single CryEngine game has ever had in multiplayer beyond 16 clients.
  4. Their custom soup (CryEngine 3.7 + custom code) just exacerbated the problem because they built it on shaky foundations.

I want to note that 30 yrs ago when I was building my first game, BC3K, there wasn’t a single engine that would support the world size, let alone the things that I wanted to do in it. I had to build a custom engine for all of it. I mean, look at this world. I built that back in 1986. And by 1996, the first BC3K game had not only space by planetary access on launch. Just getting that to work was the biggest challenge and the reason that it took so long to build - and work. By 2001 I had added fps in the Battlecruiser Millennium game. And I just kept adding to it right through to the Universal Combat series. All my games use this same world, lore etc. In the All Aspects series released in 2009, I came up with a new planetary terrain engine and ripped out the legacy one. In the WIP Line Of Defense, I did that again. You always have to iterate and build the tools that make the dream work. If you can’t do that, you’re just going to get stuck along the way. And if you don’t have the [free] money to carry on, you’re just headed for failure.

When Frontier was building Elite, they came up with a similar tech that “sharded” their massive universe to give the appearance of a cohesive whole. It really isn’t magic. It’s just talent + tech to pull off things like this. And despite having the talent, if the engine and tools aren’t capable of doing what you want, the end result is Star Citizen.

Also, look at Crucible, the first AAA game from AGS. It was literally DOA. And it’s based on yet another custom version of CryEngine in which even the installation of the toolset is aggravating AF. It has a single map. Seriously. One. Single. Map.

This is Lumberyard. Seriously. Watch that. All of it.

You’re joking now; but just wait until they do just that. :)

Never Forget. Three years ago today, Squadron 42 fell off the radar.

When I wrote this, I remember the hate that I got over it.

I mean, it’s not as if they lied…

…or was it something else?

Yikes

You have to admit, definitely Free Flying at the end there.

So the CIG web site crashed today. Why? Because…

Wow… I don’t even…

I should not be surprised at this point, but really, it boggles my mind. That kind of money for not even actual game stuff. I mean, even if they were real in-game pixel ships that actually worked as advertised, those prices are obscene (to me, YMMV). As frantic delusional wish-fulfillment fantasies, they’re just pathetic.