The initial implementation of insurance is coming in 3.0.
The initial implementation of the economic background simulation is coming in 3.0, but it will be bare-bones as they’re only dealing with basic commodities at this point (not ships or ship components). My understanding is that as more items and item types are added to the economy in subsequent patches, the background simulation will expand to cover them. Ways to make money in 3.0 will include doing missions and hauling/stealing cargo.
My guess is it will be a work in progress.
As well as anything would work in that scenario? It seems like they’re postponing 3.0 until they deal with that.
Your currency is persisted fine from session to session now, we won’t know how well inventory persists until we get our hands on 3.0.
TBD
The purpose of the economy in 3.0 is mainly to test cargo hauling as a profession. They’re clearly pushing for component and ships sales in future versions though, as evidenced by them showing work-in-progress kiosk UI’s for those items in that recent AtV video.
Doubtful. As seen in the latest production schedule:
This is a screen capture of the current count of all issues we’re intending to burn down before we consider releasing to Evocati.
A developer of the forums cautioned that these numbers may increase in this week’s schedule.
Sorry but that’s not true. The economy isn’t coming online. Please go ahead and show me where you see that ANYWHERE in the short term schedule that currently is 3.0 - 3.2.
We already went through this. There are LOTS of things they’ve assigned to devs that were either shit-canned, yet to be touched, or still in progress. I should mention that 3.0 was due out in Dec 2016.
You’re getting ahead of yourself. There is currently NOTHING in the game’s framework to support ANY of that. Like at all.
Says who? After the delays since June, it’s definitely going to Evocati tomorrow? LOL!! I will believe it when I see it.
Yup. You are aware that back when sources told me that the internal dev schedule was no way reflective of the public schedule, some people thought I was making shit up. Then in the 08/04 schedule, a bunch of NEW items automagically appeared in the schedule. Just like that. Out of nowhere. I wrote about that here, along with the post of the analysis.
They removed the description once it became feature complete, but I found an archived version from April.
SOLAR SYSTEM SHOP SERVICE
The Solar System Shop Service dictates what retail products, natural resources, and services shops are willing to buy and sell. It also decides their current level of inventory and prices, all of which may vary over time. It acts as an intermediary between the game and the back end simulation/rule set.
ETA is 21st April
The text from the current production schedule is as follows:
I think I’ve said this before, but there’s just no incentive to actually deliver the product when imaginary in game items are selling for thousands of dollars… delivering the product will just result in a many lost woodies and refund demands.
They, in the very least, need to demonstrate overall progress so as to avoid a rebellion.
To add to that, if they announced that ships would not be purchasable with in-game currency, I think there would be a shitstorm the likes of which we haven’t seen before.
The Solar System Shop Service is the system that will determine the inventory and prices (buying and selling) of every shop based on the background simulation and the shop’s category. It is the evolving invisible hand of the economic simulation, a la Freelancer’s original vision. Its presence in 3.0 marks the first steps of a simulated economy. You will be able to purchase goods at one location and turn them for a profit at other locations.
What will be missing in 3.0, to my knowledge, is the production chain whereby items (materials) are turned into different items (products) which are tracked by the simulation. This is a critical component of Star Citizen’s vision no doubt, but to say that this precludes 3.0 from featuring an economy is to say that Elite: Dangerous has no economy, since that game does not have a real production chain either (they simply have categorized locations that supply and demand different items, something which is included in the Solar System Shop Service description).
They frequently bring up the topic of purchasing ships, that is, they frequently bring up adding the functionality to purchase them with in-game currency. Why would there be a shitstorm in response to their current course of action, which is showing progress on what they promised?
Given the swathe of features and mechanics yet to be even close to implemented, any ‘economy’ being introduced in 3.0 is going to be so far from final form as to be practically worthless. They cannot be spending time tweaking a complex supply chain economy when more than half the game systems don’t exist.
It will be basic in 3.0, and mainly exist to test cargo hauling. However, it will be connected to their backend simulation, as mentioned in the production schedule.
In case you hadn’t heard, in this past Friday’s update, CIG went from a schedule with delivery windows, to “f@ck you, we ain’t you telling shit” 😂 They removed all dates in latest version. Instead, they’re now going to be doing a new show segment called a “burndown” which is supposed keep backers up to date on the project. Except now with no schedules on what is being delivered and when.
I wonder how much of their backers’ money they burned for that 20 minute movie explaining how they’re following normal development processes?
I mean golly, JIRA, GANTT projects, and burndown charts, how exotic! What were they doing before they moved to this brave new development paradigm? I’m surprised they didn’t drop in a bunch of cut n’ paste bullshit about agile, kanban boards, scrums, and stand-ups and act like they invented all that stuff yesterday.
Check out the high-level overviews, they’re the linked pictures. None of them goes further out than September 1st.
So either they’re going to finish such extremely high-level milestones as “Persistent Universe Content” and “Gameplay” in the next 2 week sprint or they’re utter bullshit.
We all know the game isn’t gonna hit real alpha (ie, feature-complete) in 2 weeks. So either say “this is what we’re working on this sprint, and we’re giving you unprecedented visibility into the day to day development process” or provide the milestones with actual burndown charts, which you’ll notice are not actually included in the post.
My company develops two products, I have high-level oversight on one of them, and even I don’t give a shit about what they’re doing in each sprint. I want the executive overview, roll up all the bullshit project tasks, tell me where we are, and let me know the blockers so I can aggressively resolve them. I want burndown charts. That’s what this promises but doesn’t provide. Anyone who’s ever worked as a developer or alongside development knows this is all smoke and mirrors.
Here’s the thing. It’s all pure and utter bullshit. Back in late 2016 when sources told me that “3.0 didn’t even exist”, back in Aug 2016 when Chris was claiming it was coming on or before Dec 2016, some backers didn’t take me seriously. We’re a year in.
The schedules are the carrot stick used to keep backers giving them money. So they have every reason to keep manipulating the schedules in any manner that keeps the money flow smooth.
Except that even the approx 2K whales still giving them money, are at their limits. So 3.0 is going to be all kinds of hilarious if they release it in the same shoddy manner that they did 2.0 back in Dec 2015.
Also, get this, word is that in Gamescom next week, the streamers who were invited to the event, are going to be playing the current 2.6.3, and not the much touted 3.0 which apparently Gamestar.de and PC Gamer claimed to have played almost two months ago. Backers haven’t played it. And they forked out $156M thus far.
I’m generally fine with burndown charts, which again you’ll notice they did not actually provide in this post. They are useful tools.
You do need to have estimated dates and effort (generally expressed as story points) on each major milestone and quality gate or the project slips forever. I encourage dev and project managers to be conservative on their dates, to leave some wriggle room for Murphy.
If they miss their deadlines they need to defend/justify why each and every time, and that is all taken into account in their KPIs and takehome quarterly bonus.
Note they do have charts labeled burndown, but they say “we just entered this phase so they aren’t accurate”. Since a burndown is just a simple chart of created vs resolved issues, what that means is they haven’t been using any sort of disciplined issue tracker throughout development, which is completely fucking bonkers on a project of this size.
As seen at the 10 second mark of that video, this content is purportedly produced using their community subscriber program as a separate pool of funding. My impression is that the video is meant to explain these normal development practices to their backers who may not work in that field.
Those milestones are the categories that you’ll see expanded upon if you scroll further down, with the individual tasks listed.
For example, the remaining task on “Persistent Universe Content” is as follows:
MISSION GIVERS
We’re introducing Miles Eckhart (first seen in the Gamescom video) and Ruto to provide missions to players.
We’re aiming to complete Ruto’s initial setup in Subsumption today, but there will be further support needed from both Gamecode Engineering and Graphics Engineering after this point.
ETA is 25th August (was 11th August)
All of the tasks in “Gameplay” are already feature complete, according to their schedule.
I find it disgusting that such a thing as a $20/month “community subscriber program” exists for an unreleased game, but your point is made. Those suckers are knowingly paying for that content.
So then once they have mission givers in and QA’d, the persistent universe is done. Check it off the list. Right?
But wait, what about the support needed from gamecode and graphics? Code and graphics are kinda big deals. Is this milestone just writing the quests themselves, or the server-side processing?
And even once all that stuff is done, it’s only complete for an arbitrary pre-alpha milestone which they labeled 3.0. It isn’t done for actual final release, right?
Also, Gameplay isn’t complete, because they’re still finding and fixing bugs on most of the major features. Perhaps initial implementation is complete, but again… who gives a shit about that level of development detail?
