I’d think most of the $ on SC has gone into running a very successful marketing campaign that has been doing updates/content for several years already.
Honestly, SC’s development has actually tackled some interesting technical problems… separate from all of the fluff immersion stuff, the ships are modeled at an impressive fidelity not just from a visual level, but the actual physical modeling of their internals, powertrains, etc., all of which have significant impacts on gameplay… that’s the stuff that is cool to me. And the ability to have guys inside ships having gun flights while the ships are flying around, and having shots from outside damage the ship, even penetrating through the hull to hit people inside while they’re running around… having all that stuff seamlessly work in a networked environment… that’s no simple feat.
To me, I’m more interested in all that stuff, in the multiplayer environment, than I am in the campaign itself. And I suspect the campaign itself has cost a good chunk of the money, since they’re paying high priced actors to play roles. But I know some folks are most interested in that part of the game, so whatever.
Look at someone like me posting here and defending SC while not having spent a single Dollar (Euro) on it so far. There is however a good chance I’ll spend money on it once it’s further in it’s development cycle. I simply didn’t buy into it yet because there is already plenty of funding and thus I prefer to buy it once I actually want to play the game (doesn’t need to be the final release but I didn’t have any interest/time for an earlier version).
I think there are a lot of people like me who are waiting to see how the project goes but are willing to invest once it’s done or at least has a reasonable amount of content.
So far there are 1,853,446 “Star Citizens”, that’s not exactly CoD numbers so there are still plenty of gamers out there.
Considering the scope of the game (this isn’t a niche product anymore) my conservative estimate is that an audience of somewhere between 5 and 10 millions is certainly possible (DayZ has around 3,5m owners on Steam and that’s a real mess of a game and what actual development hell looks like and PlayerUnknown’s battleground has already sold 4 million units).
Is all that already in the game, or is all that things that might make it to the game one day (but as of yet haven’t)? As far as I know, physical modeling of anything outside of thrusters (acting over a basic rigid body physical simulation that’s far from groundbreaking or innovative) is yet to be seen in the game, cargo (or crew) doesn’t change center of mass or anything (only altering abstracted performance stats with no real physics playing a part), and there’s no proper simulation of armor penetration or anything of the sort… is it?
Parts of what you mentioned have been there for a while. The thruster systems are themselves fairly interesting, although they’ve iterated over a few different versions. They are actually simulating the thrusters as physical things which are moving around, not just creating force, but this ended up making pilots confused, add the result was that there was a delay in pilot input… Not because the system lagged, but because it would take a shot time for the thrusters to actually reorient themselves to exert force as you wanted.
Most of the ships are flown based on physics based thrust, and damage does change the ships mass, which is derived from the actual physical model in most cases (one exception is that the physical model used for flight Dynamics of the one alien ship with the giant wing blade is different than the model used for visualization and damage, because the huge blade made the center of gravity so oddly placed that it was impossible to fly. But for most ships, your ships flight characteristics are directly driven by the physics of the ships themselves. As components get blown off, the mass changes. As thrusters get damaged, you lose the ability to control it as well.
One thing to note about this though, is that you aren’t directly controlling the thrusters. Your input is going into the flight control system, which is then automatically adjusting thrusters to do what you want. So, the net effect is that when parts are blown off, the FCS tries to compensate, minimizing the effects as best it can. The guy programming the FCS and physics for flying wrote all kinds of cool stuff on this… I forget what his name was… pritchet, I think? It’s in their forums somewhere.
This video shows some of the damage modeling, although here they are mainly talking about the visualization part of how the damage system drives the explosions and stuff, and they mention the notion of shots piercing the ship to damage subsystems. They were showing it off in 2015.
Now, the key thing with enabling the real stuff like piecing shots and damaging subsystems depends on their new item 2.0 system. This is in the game now, in that it’s been designed and coded, but they still need to upgrade the older ships to use it. They have fully upgraded the m50 as of June to use it. We should see it play a role in SC 3.0 whenever that comes out.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/star-citizen/star-citizen-item-20-update
So, given what’s already in there, I think it’s beyond pure fluff that may appear at some point. It seems like they’ve actually done the engineering.
APB at #7. Heh.
The latest schedule report has an interesting bit of information:
Currently, performance and stability drop sharply once the active players in a server reach 12-15 players.
For a game that intends to be pretty much a MMO, that’s… kind of a big deal.
Come on, what do you want for $150M+… :P
The scope has significantly expanded since {insert feature} was announced on {insert date} therefore it is wrong to criticise CIG and this is in fact a very positive thing because {insert fatuous fawning}.
You aren’t even trying to be fair, are you? There are simple shooters having performance problems with that amount of players, I don’t think it’s an issue to admit that at this point there are still performance/stability issues.
Not to mention that they specifically say they want to improve this for the 3.0 release and the only reason for this is probably because of people like you.
Usually you really wouldn’t care that much about performance at this point in such an early stage but they obviously have to treat even such a version like it’s a product for release and not just some test build.
It really makes it obivous that a lot of people simply can’t handle the realities of development. This isn’t something new, I see it all the time for other games that are still in Alpha but SC certainly brings this to a new level due to all the controversies.
That’s why I’m not surprised by all the delays, they are under huge pressure to deliver an Alpha release that isn’t really an Alpha.
e: I have never seen a game development project that was this transparent, especially not of this scale. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t put myself out there like this even if I raised this amount of money because they certainly give a lot more insight than is neccessary or could be expected (having something like bugsmashers where actucal code is shown and discussed? That’s admirable). They have now taken this another step further with making the whole schedule public.
Minecraft? Endless Legend/Endless Space 2? Rim World? Prison Architect. They were all remarkably transparent. You don’t appear to be even trying to be fair either.
Those games really don’t come close kedaha, they were of course also transparent but not on the same level as SC and in cases like EL/ES2 the process of making it transparent started much later in development (look at when their first Alpha released and when the game was available => I know because I was in their Alpha).
Having said that I love RimWorld and followed its development from the beginning but then we are talking about double standards because this game has been in alpha since 2013 (!) and just now came into Early Access. So even such a little project can suffer a very long development time if it’s all done in public.
If people aren’t even able to admit that SC is doing something very unique in this industry then it’s hard to have a good discussion at all. I’m not saying it will be an amazing game just because it’s developed in this way but it’s still remarkable even if you wouldn’t have any interest in the game itself.
What about Minecraft for example was less transparent? That it was a smaller project doesn’t mean it was less transparent, that’s you appearing to not even try to be fair. It’s simply shifting the goalposts.
Quite the opposite, I would argue that the constant changing of features, constant delays and the constant cut down on features in imminent releases is evidence that Star Citizen has the appearance of being transparent but isn’t. If it was truly transparent, this would not be happening or would at the very least, be known far ahead of time. It isn’t as if slippage only happens right before release date, it’s known from essentially day one (though not to what extent).
“Feature X will be released in 12 months with these 5 Planets” followed by 12 months later “We will be releasing Feature X in 9 months with 2 planets” isn’t transparency.
This is not a “simple shooter” (and Planetside 2 would like to have a talk with you). This is game that promises to have hundreds or thousands of people playing in one server (or on multiple servers that “feel” like one), interacting with each other, and many of its promises actually depend on that kind of thing.
And as of now, it’s not only a problem of having 12-15 players causing performance issues. It is a problem of 12-15 players per server causing not only performance issues, but stability problems - which means that anything over that number might actually crash the server altogether.
Now, were this a “simple shooter”, everything would be OK (or maybe not, considering how many “simple shooters” support 32+ players in one server). But it sells itself as a lot more, and so far, even this far into the development process, it doesn’t even show a solid foundation on which to build something that will fulfill its own promises. That’s why it’s significant.
Yeah, people like me, who understand that this is not OK and normal. Or people like their backers, many of which are starting to doubt the project. And future backers, who, upon knowing that the server crashes with less than 20 people, will start to wonder if CIG will be able to come even close to what has been promised.
They are certainly not worried about you, who will see this as “normal”. Because if everyone were like you, they could extend this charade for more 10 years while delivering little more than colorful JPGs and fancy concept sales and schedule reports that promise the world and never go anywhere.
No - what it makes obvious is that quite a few people can’t handle reality at all, and must come with excuses like “you don’t know what development is like”, “it’s just an alpha”, “they’re doing something no one even ever tried before”, “of course it will take a long time, but it will be everything they promised someday”, “Chris Roberts knows what he’s doing”, and “I would never be mistaken, and if I believe in this, than all must be right with it”.
At this point in the project - at least 3-5 years in (depending on who you ask), having servers crash when they reach 15 players in a game that is supposed to have hundreds or thousands per server is a red flag the size of Kansas. But hey, don’t let experienced software developers/architects like myself tell you otherwise! You of course know better. We can only be haters that hate everything that’s good and holy for absolutely no reason.
Just to be clear, this isn’t what they are talking about. The numbers they are shooting for isn’t going to be everyone in the game on one server.
The servers they are talking about here are running a single instance of a particular location of space. You are never going to see more than a few dozen other players, tops, in any one server like that.
Here’s an old design article talking about the instancing stuff:
So, with that in mind, the issue you describe isn’t quite of the magnitude that you thought it was. It’s still an issue, which is why it’s being tracked as such… But it’s not the ultimate fail you might have thought it was.
Even then, that’s a problem, especially when you consider multi-crew ships. And if they want to have people invading the big ships and having firefights in them, 12-15 players is an awful low limit. If we’re talking about instances, they should shoot for something in the 32-64 range at least, if they want to deliver the kind of experience they promised (and that’s compromising on what they promised, actually). And I’m not even counting the “NPC population” they promised and the consequences of that depending on their implementation (oh boy, in technical terms, that will be a tough nut to crack).
And I’m not even getting into more direct engineering/non-functional concerns like what would be the impact of having low player counts per instance in terms of infrastructure and inter-server communication (and latency/bandwidth requirements). What little they said about that particular problem was little more than hand-waving at this point, and the kind of limitation I pointed out only makes the issue worse.
So, no matter which way you see it, it is in practice a big deal. This issue might actually invalidate the whole premise of that part of the project. I assume they’re doing something to correct that, but I do think that adding that kind of issue in the schedule report is the tacit admission that they are having bigger issues to fix this than they anticipated, and will release 3.0 in that state (because they have little choice), and that’s troubling to say the least.
Yes, it’s clearly an issue, which is why they are tracking it. But the idea that it will somehow compromise the entire project is kind of silly. It’s a scalability problem. You run into those once you start doing testing with more players. They’ll just work the problem and fix it. They’ve hit similar stability issues in prior passes and dealt with them.
I’ve seen software projects go from possible to not viable and cancelled because of lesser issues (and many critical issues that make projects non-viable are exactly of the “non-functional” type, which includes scalability), but, for the record, I hope you’re right. I’d say it’s certainly a fixable problem (since there are games that have solved it), but I’m under the impression that it might be particularly difficult to fix in CIG’s case due to the engine they use.
At this point, the networking code is totally custom. There’s nothing left from the original CryEngine netcode.
I think minecraft never had a production schedule up (I think even the design goals of the project were never stated until very close to release). These guys really are showing how the sausage (a perhaps too ambitious sausage with a shady business model, to be fair) is made. The transparency they have is astounding. Only thing I can think of to improve it would be to release the budget estimations per task/department.
This is obviously a problematic production, but it’s not a highly unusual one in the amount of problems vs. scale they are facing. If this was a big studio game, they might have been canceled by now (maybe not) because it’s just too big a game to be on it but they found a business model that allows it to struggle onwards even if it’s a suspect business model indeed. I also don’t trust their ability to finish it after having seen the speed of progress (the breaking point for me was about ten months ago) but actually seeing their production schedule makes me more confidant in the prediction.
Of course, dialing down the 100 systems to about 15 puts it back in the realm of possibility (IMHO their biggest issue is content creation, not tech. They are doing really cool things with the tech) , but that’s a very significant change of scope.