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

[Gordon_Cameron]

I’m not going to piss on the dream of a space sim that also allows you to walk around. If you like, you can call it Morrowind + Spaceships rather than Elite + Walking. Whatevs! The basic concept was implemented in Space Rogue almost 30 years ago and that was a great little game. As always it comes down to the execution.

[dsmart]

“Sorry, we didn’t think people would actually want to fly the big ships they paid $100’s of dollar for, so really, it’s a surprise to us that they are.”

Bingo.

And of course, no Christ Roberts disaster would be complete without his legendary blame shifting.

[TimJames]

This is why they teach not just reading, but reading comprehension in schools.

I can just picture you in front of a class of grade school kids with their mouths hanging open:

“…JK Rowling thinks you’re all a bunch of dumb suckers. Wake up!”

[dsmart]

I can just picture you in front of a class of grade school kids with their mouths hanging open:

“…this is why JK Rowling thinks you’re all a bunch of dumb suckers. Wake up!”

Yeah, my wife always tells me that I’m a terrible teacher. :)

[Brooski]

Yes. No “blaming” there. Just describing the situation. Honestly I don’t get how you can read the post and come to conclusion that he blames gamers.

Dunno about blame, but honestly, that RSI explanation sure reads funny to me.

In our internal testing we didn’t witness the performance issues that we saw on PTU or Live once thousands of players got in and started doing all sorts of crazy things. Fill up a Caterpillar with cargo, blow it up over an Outpost on a moon and you can bring the clients and servers to their knees (as you’ve just added hundreds if not thousands of additional objects to simulate).

? They didn’t expect players to have ships with cargo that blew up, and that the cargo might become an object in the game that the engine would have to render? Isn’t this the game where RSI sold the very idea of being a trader or a pirate and hijacking or otherwise delivering or stealing cargo? Where did they expect the cargo to go? Isn’t this the kind of thing you do in design: figure out what your game is about, and then figure out how the engine can accommodate the things you are going to put in the game? And FIVE YEARS LATER they figure out they didn’t account for the cargo in their game about transporting space cargo? And they’re obsessing over item pick-up tech?

I’m not a game developer. Maybe this is all normal.

[tbaldree]

[rhamorim]

“Dear, if you don’t know the answer, just tell him!”

Speaking as an engineer… that answer is much closer to the truth than most people would think. ;)

[rho21]

? They didn’t expect players to have ships with cargo that blew up, and that the cargo might become an object in the game that the engine would have to render? Isn’t this the game where RSI sold the very idea of being a trader or a pirate and hijacking or otherwise delivering or stealing cargo? Where did they expect the cargo to go? Isn’t this the kind of thing you do in design: figure out what your game is about, and then figure out how the engine can accommodate the things you are going to put in the game? And FIVE YEARS LATER they figure out they didn’t account for the cargo in their game about transporting space cargo? And they’re obsessing over item pick-up tech?

I’m not a game developer. Maybe this is all normal.

This is sort of semi-normal. Qualitatively normal but not quantitatively, if you like.

The stress test of trying things out with loads of players is always going to throw up bugs of this sort. That’s why you do the test in the first place. Of course you try to predict during development what’s going to produce too many objects (and so how and when you’re going to have to cull those objects), but there are always going to be some corner cases you’ve missed.

This case seems rather worse than normal though: it looks more tied to number of objects in game rather than number of players, and it doesn’t appear to be all that much of a corner case. So it should really have been discovered by QA internally.

Suggests to me that either QA is underfunded or that the problems are known and ignored: perhaps the engine team says they’re going to have to cull dropped cargo above a certain number of objects, but management indicates that’s not acceptable because like immersion and shit.

[meeper]

Suggests to me that either QA is underfunded or that the problems are known and ignored: perhaps the engine team says they’re going to have to cull dropped cargo above a certain number of objects, but management indicates that’s not acceptable because like immersion and shit.

Or that the Roberts quote is bullshit and they knew it was going to be an issue and pushed it out anyway because reasons.

[JeffL]

I absolutely don’t believe they did not see these issues in testing. How could they have not seen them?

Which means they knew the servers would routinely be overstressed and thus produce crappy performance and still released it. Why is pure speculation, but BS on all their testing didn’t see this.

[Miramon]

They are obviously grossly understaffed to accomplish anything, because otherwise they already would have accomplished something. And whenever there is stress on a development organization, QA is always worse off than anyone else because management is always stupid that way. They probably have a priority-1-severity-1 list that stretches on to the horizon, unaddressed from years ago. So a little thing like not being able to model unpowered cargo crates is so far down on the queue it might as well not have been posted in the first place.

[vyshka]

Themed Universes? I want them to redo Star Citizen as Ice Pirates :)

[Kadath]

Holy smokes. Derek and I exchanged a 3 tweet conversation 2 days ago and I STILL have trolls in my mentions. They just jumped in the convo and have not let go. It’s crazy.

[rei]

You can’t have issues in testing if you don’t test.

[Telefrog]

Space Herpes - $250 buy-in.

[Hotfreak]

You can’t have issues in testing if you don’t test.

Clear winner.

[dsmart]

I’m not a game developer. Maybe this is all normal.

I am a game developer. No, it’s not normal.

[dsmart]

Holy smokes. Derek and I exchanged a 3 tweet conversation 2 days ago and I STILL have trolls in my mentions. They just jumped in the convo and have not let go. It’s crazy.

They are blocked. So what they do is monitor my feed incognito. Then respond to my follows while tagging me. That’s why I tend to go into their feed, export ALL their followers, then add them to my block list.

[dsmart]

LOL!!

ch11rch

[YakAttack]

The animation is pretty good for a video game.